xJawn NHL expected goals

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Today's puzzle Remember Some Guys — name the skater from the shape of his career. Three clues, one guess a day. Play →

Win probabilities from the Poisson matchup engine (matchup__5184e7b0) — team xG-rate ratings → expected goals → a score grid. Every number below was issued before puck drop and is scored honestly against the result. How it works & why it can lose to a logistic.

Slate

MatchupStatusThe call Expected goals
NYR @ EDM final 3–1 EDM 55% 2.96–3.25
PHI @ VAN PHI 55% 3.06–2.78
NYI @ SJS NYI 56% 3.33–2.94

Click a matchup for its page — an upcoming game shows the predicted shot map and breakdown; a finished game opens on what happened, next to the pregame call. Every slate the engine has ever scored is browsable from the date selector. Or build any matchup in the lab — pick the teams, drag the rest sliders, and score it with the same engine.

Last night in xG

Sunday, November 8, 2026 · 6 games · Save the image

expected goals goal empty-net goal big number = final · away on the left

Each column is a team's expected goals and each puck one of its goals, on one scale for the whole night, so a stack taller than its column finished above its chances. An empty-net goal is an outlined puck (its attempts are not in xG); the shootout winner's credited goal gets no puck. The big number is the official final.

Season accuracy tracker

Log-loss (lower is better) over 278 completed games this season, every prediction scored as it was issued. This is the public, unfalsifiable record — the append-only live file means we cannot re-grade a past call.

Enginelog-lossaccuracygames
Logistic (challenger) 0.643 62.9% 278
Poisson (shipped) 0.647 64.0% 278
Elo (baseline) 0.653 59.7% 278
Home-rate (floor) 0.685 57.2% 278

The shipped engine is Poisson. Its backtest twin, a plain Logistic regression on the same ratings, edges it on winner log-loss by ~0.003 — but only the generative Poisson produces the expected-goals score grid needed to price totals and puck lines, so it stays the headline. Both beat Elo and the home-rate floor. Full walk-forward methodology in how the engine works.