Unmasking the NHL’s Deceptive .500 Teams: Who’s Faking Success This Weekend?

In the wild, wacky world of sports, hitting the .500 mark usually means you’re just scraping by—neither spectacular nor dreadful, a perfectly balanced see-saw of wins and losses. But in the NHL? Ha! That straightforward notion gets tossed out the ice rink window. Thanks to the league’s baffling decision back in ’99 to hand out points for losses—yes, you read that right—a team can look shiny and shiny in the standings while actually losing more than they’re winning. It’s a maddening twist that skews the leaderboard and leaves fans scratching their heads. This season, that loser point nonsense has gone off the rails, creating more “fake” .500 teams than ever before. So, buckle up as we dive into the top five teams that are fooling their way to respectable records despite their actual performance. Buckets of shame and some eye-opening stats ahead. LEARN MORE.

If you’re a sports fan, you know what “.500” means. In general, it means you’re average. Mediocre. Just OK. And specifically, it means you’ve won as many games as you’ve lost.

The exception: the NHL. Since 1999, the league has given out points for losing, which is dumb but we’ve been over that. In the NHL, we rank teams based on their points percentage, and because of those loser points, you can have a percentage north of .500 even if you’ve lost more than you’ve won.

Most years, it’s annoying. This year, with the loser point being well and truly out of control, it’s messing up the standings even more than usual. So this week, let’s take a look at five teams that are fake. 500 — which is to say, they’re sitting at .500 or better even though they’ve lost more games than they’ve won. We’ll name and shame those teams here, and rank them from least to most fake.

Bonus five: The NHL’s fakest fake .500 teams

5. Columbus Blue Jackets – A classic example, as they’ve won 13 games and lost 16 but the league says they’re over .550.

4. Ottawa Senators/Toronto Maple Leafs – It feels like we’ve spent the last month talking about how the Leafs are a mess and the Senators are the only good Canadian team, so it’s mildly surprising to see them sporting identical records. Both teams are 13-11-4, which means both teams are comfortably over .500 and it’s fake.

3. Los Angeles Kings – They looked great against the Chicago Blackhawks on Saturday, but at 13-8-7 that still means they’re a .589 team that’s lost two more than they’ve won.

2. Chicago Blackhawks/San Jose Sharks (tie) – Seeing last year’s 31st and 32nd place teams sitting over .500 in December is impressive, as long as you don’t notice that San Jose has lost 16 of 30 and Chicago has lost 17 out of 29.

1. Seattle Kraken – They’re comfortably over .500 despite winning just 11 of 26 games, meaning only Nashville have fewer wins. More on them in a bit.

Honorable mentions: Yes, there are somehow too many fake .500 teams in this league to fit into a list even when you cheat and use ties. I didn’t include the New York Rangers or Utah Mammoth, since I figure their records come closest to feeling like an accurate representation of who they are. And I didn’t mention the Edmonton Oilers because they’re going to win 10 games in a row any second now and make all of this moot.

By the way, let’s slip in two more loser point-related notes here, both involving Boston. First, congratulations to the Bruins for being the last team standing without a loser point, an honor they earned when the Winnipeg Jets lost a shootout to the Montreal Canadiens last week. As we now know, they’ll be richly rewarded in some way during the 2026-27 season, because the hockey gods hate the loser point.

And in a related story that I didn’t catch until a reader flagged it for me: Because of their lack of loser points, the Bruins are now in a position where they could pull off one of the dumbest achievements that’s even possible in this dumb league. As of this morning, the Bruins were tied for second in the Eastern Conference in wins, while also being tied for first in regulation losses. Yes, there’s a realistic chance that at some point this year, the same team could be alone in first place in a conference in both the “W” and the “L” column.

That would be so stupid. I want it to happen so bad.

OK, on to this week’s rankings…

Road to the Cup

The five teams with the best chances of winning the Stanley Cup.

I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but the Oilers might be Oiling again.

That’s 15 goals in their last two games, with the Sabres up next.

5. Vegas Golden Knights (14-6-8, +6 true goals differential*) – They’re almost fake .500 themselves, thanks to all those loser points. But that might be enough in the Pacific.

4. Carolina Hurricanes (17-9-2, +12) – How worried should we be getting about Freddie Andersen? He’s given up three goals or more in each of his last seven starts, and hasn’t had a game with a save percentage over .900 since Nov. 1. It’s hardly contributed to a crisis in Carolina, since Brandon Bussi and Pyotr Kochetkov have both been good. But at 36 and playing on a one-year deal, you wonder if this could be the end of the Andersen era in Carolina.

3. Tampa Bay Lightning (16-10-2, +15) – An interesting note: Over the weekend, the Lightning briefly moved ahead of the Avalanche in terms of Cup odds from Dom’s models. Presumably that’s largely based on the lack of competition in the East, but it’s still surprising given the Avs’ dominance.

Meanwhile, they’ve lost three straight in regulation and visit the suddenly lukewarm Leafs tonight.

2. Dallas Stars (20-5-5, +27) – Ho hum, just seven wins in eight games, and points in all of their last ten. They’re pushing Colorado in terms of total points, getting as close as one point back on Saturday, although the Avs still hold a game in hand.

1. Colorado Avalanche (21-2-6, +52) – Filthy.

*Goals differential without counting shootout decisions like the NHL does for some reason.

Not ranked: Washington Capitals – I’ve been accused by Caps fans of napping on their team so far this season. I think they may have a case.

As recently as last week’s newsletter, I basically wrote off the Metro as being a battle between the Hurricanes and Devils and a bunch of also-rans. The top-five rankings have reflected that, those two teams being the only ones in the division to get any love. Meanwhile, the team that finished first in the division last season was overcoming a slow start to end up in the same spot this year, and nobody seemed to be paying attention.

And … yeah, guilty, I suppose. It wasn’t unreasonable to think a team that was only barely fake .500 in mid-November wasn’t a real contender. But you could make the case they’ve been the league’s best team, non-Avalanche category, ever since then. They won nine of ten including six straight, a streak that finally ended on Friday in a shootout loss to the Ducks. They’ve been as high as second spot in goals differential, a position they share with the Stars after last night’s shutout win over Columbus.

That’s not to say that this stretch has been dominant. In fact, that nine-of-ten stretch came against a schedule that was basically a who’s-who of struggling teams around the league, including the Kings (twice), Leafs, Jets and Oilers. Mix in a few blowouts against teams that they should beat, like San Jose and Columbus, and the wins pile up. But the only team they played over that stretch that really feels like a contender right now is Tampa, and that’s the game they lost.

As always, you can only beat the teams you get to play, and taking care of business against struggling opponents is part of being a winning team. And the Caps do seem to have hit a tipping point last week, with the Other Rankings lads moving them all the way up to third on Friday — not just top spot for any Metro team, but ahead of everyone else in the entire conference.

I’m not there yet. Neither are the oddsmakers, who still have the Caps well behind the Hurricanes, Lightning and Panthers in their Stanley Cup futures listings (although some books have moved them ahead of the Devils). That’s probably just fine for Washington fans, who’ve been able to credibly bang the “nobody believes in us” drum for going on three seasons now.

For now, Caps fans will just have to settle for watching a fun season play out. They’ve got Logan Thompson making a run at the Vezina, Jakob Chychrun at least making Cale Makar sweat a bit for the Norris, and maybe even Spencer Carberry building a case to be the first back-to-back Jack Adams winner since the ’80s. And of course, Tom Wilson’s push for Team Canada will be front-page news up here for the next few weeks, which will just shine a bigger spotlight on what the Capitals are doing right now.

For now, they’ve got the Hurricanes up next in a Thursday night showdown on home ice that’s an early contender for game of the week.

The bottom five

The five teams headed towards dead last and the best lottery odds for Gavin McKenna (we think).

We had what I think is our first official vote of confidence for a beleaguered coach over the weekend, and it wasn’t the one most of us would have expected.

Reached out to Ken Holland regarding today’s speculation of a potential coaching change in L.A. and the Kings GM says “there’s zero truth” to that.

— Pierre LeBrun (@PierreVLeBrun) December 5, 2025

Huh. I picked Jim Hiller to be my first coach fired before the season began, although it was supposed to have already happened by now. Instead, he had the Kings near the top of the division by mid-November. But since then they’ve lost six of nine, so keep an eye on the situation.

5. Buffalo Sabres (11-13-4, -14) – The good news: They were the only team in the league to get both Saturday and Sunday off, so the players are probably all caught up on their Christmas shopping. The bad news: In our second round of predictions, the Sabres were the only team in the East to not get a single vote as a playoff contender.

4. St. Louis Blues (11-12-7, -25) – This feels like the sort of list you don’t want to be dead last on.

3. Vancouver Canucks (11-15-3, -21) – If you missed it last week, be sure to check Harman’s look into what’s surely the most pressing question in Vancouver right now: Can they tank, and if so what do they need to do? That’s a question that will take on some extra urgency after reports that Quinn Hughes may well and truly be in play.

“It’s not like me, Jim + Fitzy hopped on a call, I wasn’t a part of that,” said Quinn Hughes when I asked for his reaction to HNIC report about conversations about his future occurring between the #Canucks and Devils. “But obviously I’m aware that things like that could happen.”

— Thomas Drance (@ThomasDrance) December 7, 2025

And yes, my reaction to that quote was the same as everyone else’s: “Fitzy” is a terrifyingly familiar way to refer to another team’s GM.

2. Calgary Flames (11-15-4, -16) – They won consecutive games in regulation for only the second time this season. And more importantly, Dustin Wolf has looked like last year’s version in those games. They get the Sabres tonight.

1. Nashville Predators (10-14-4, -27) – I’m telling you, Juuse Saros to the Oilers makes at least a little bit more sense than you might think it does.

Not ranked: Seattle Kraken – It kind of feels like the bubble has burst in Seattle after the Kraken spent most of the first two months looking like surprise playoff contenders. Despite few of us having them as a legitimate playoff contender coming into the season, they looked the part up until a few weeks ago.

(Fun fact: The Kraken were the last Western team to have a three-game losing streak this season. Yes, including the Avalanche.)

Now we get to the bad news, because it’s been ugly lately. The Kraken have lost five straight, including the last four in regulation. That span includes two shutouts, plus a pair against the Oilers that saw Seattle outscored 13-4. Those games allowed Edmonton to push past them into a playoff spot, and they’re even behind the Sharks today by points (but not percentage).

So it’s over. Unless we’re all wrong again.

That doesn’t feel likely right now. The Kraken have been a team loaded with star power, and scoring is an issue. The penalty kill has been brutally bad. The five-on-five numbers are ugly. Philipp Grubauer remains a sub-.900 goalie for the fifth straight year, and Joey Daccord hasn’t been good enough to make up for the other weaknesses on most nights. Jaden Schwartz, who’d been their leading scorer, is on IR.

If there’s any optimism, our staff isn’t finding it. Harman had them at a 2/10 to make the playoffs in his recent roundup of early surprises. And in our staff picks, they had more of us thinking they’d plummet all the way to dead last (one voter) than thought they’d make the postseason (zero).

All that said, we’ve been wrong on this team before. And there are certainly some winnable games on the schedule between now and the holidays, including the Sabres, Flames, Sharks and the struggling Kings twice. They’ve got the Wild tonight, and that team hasn’t made much sense at all lately.

It’s the Pacific, so anyone who pretends they know anything is lying. But if the Kraken are going to stay in this race, it’s time for them to start surprising us again.