NHL Best Bets for Tuesday (11/19)
Kenneth Le
Just over halfway through the season, it appears that 2024 will go down as the year of the Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas.
We all know that the NFL season is short, and that 18 weeks isn’t really long enough to filter out all the randomness. Whether that’s injury luck, or fumble luck, or “our opponent just hit a miracle Hail Mary” luck, there’s just not enough time for everything to shake out and get to perfectly even. Small matters of execution or bang-bang plays may not fall into that same category of ‘luck’, but given a 100-game schedule, maybe everyone would have a game where their toe slipped outside the end zone or would see a game-winning field goal blocked at the buzzer. But we don’t have 100 games, and so here we are.
It’s not really fair to call these lucky wins, as if the winning teams had no agency whatsoever. Blocking a field goal may not have much predictive value, but it’s not like Kansas City or Green Bay just flipped a coin and were declared the winners. They overloaded one side of the line, a player beat his blocker, and they made a play, just like they practiced. At the same time, though, it’s very easy to imagine an alternate universe where someone was a step slower or a hair faster; where one play could flip a game without really affecting how good a team actually played. Maybe you would have won, but you missed a tackle in overtime. Maybe you could have run, but you eschewed a go-ahead field goal just to fail on fourth down. Maybe you should have won, but the referees missed an obvious penalty. These are great for arguing that your team should do better in the future, or would be threatening if the teams played again, but that doesn’t help you in the standings. Woulda-coulda-shoulda games can define your season.
If you feel like there are more teams this year that have been snakebit or have a rabbit’s foot shoved up somewhere, you’re right. Close losses have not been evenly distributed this year, in a way we haven’t seen for quite some time.
There are 12 teams that are currently 3 or -3 in their win-loss records in one-score games, from the Chiefs at 7-0 ( 7) to the Jaguars and Bengals at 1-6 (-5). There were just seven such teams last season, and we haven’t seen that many unbalanced one-score games though Week 11 since 2010. There are 12 teams that are at least one game above or below what their cumulative Post-Game Win Expectancy would predict compared to 10 last season at this point – and four at least 1.5 games out, compared to just one (Philadelphia) last season. You’ll get similar results if you’re looking at estimated wins or Pythagorean wins or any other win-predicting method you have at your disposal – these less-predictive results are particularly lopsided in 2024.
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