I was today days old when I learned there's a free site that runs 20,000 Monte Carlo simulations of every NHL playoff series every single day — so instead of a pundit's hot take, you get actual math.
The NHL playoffs just started. Every bar, every podcast, every group chat is full of takes. "My team's got this." "No way they beat that goalie." "Bet the over, it's going seven." Meanwhile, tucked away at moneypuck.com, a free website is quietly running twenty thousand simulations of the whole playoff bracket every day, updating the odds after every single game, and handing you the result for free.
What the site actually shows you:
- Playoff series odds. Pick any matchup. You'll see each team's probability of winning the series, game-by-game win probabilities, and the likelihood of the series ending in four, five, six, or seven games. Refreshed daily.
- Live in-game win probability. Open a live game and watch the win-probability line shift in real time as shots, goals, and penalties happen. If you've ever wondered "are we actually cooked here?", the chart has an answer.
- Expected goals (xG). MoneyPuck is built around xG — the stat that weights every shot by how likely it was to score, based on location, angle, rebound status, and game situation. Boxscores tell you shots on goal. xG tells you the quality of those shots. Two different answers. xG is usually the more predictive one.
- Power rankings and standings. Sorted by expected goals rather than actual wins. You find out which teams are over-performing (riding hot goaltending) and which are under-performing (a shooting slump away from a run). This is a different league table than the one on ESPN.
What "20,000 simulations a day" actually means. Every day, MoneyPuck takes the current stats — team xG, goalie save percentages, injuries, home/away splits — and runs 20,000 simulated versions of the rest of the season or playoff bracket. Each simulation is a different random outcome of every future game. Then it counts how often each team wins the series or the Cup. That's how you get numbers like "Oilers 62.4% to win in 6 or fewer." It's not a guess. It's a probability distribution, updated daily.
Who makes it: a software engineer named Peter Tanner, who has been running MoneyPuck as a free public resource for years. No paywall, no gated premium tier, no pop-up asking for your email. It's just there. The major hockey-writing outlets (The Athletic, Sportsnet, lots of Substacks) have cited MoneyPuck data for so long it's basically ambient.
How to use it during the playoffs:
- Go to moneypuck.com and click Playoffs.
- Find your team. Look at the series probabilities and the per-game win odds.
- Bookmark it. Check it the morning of every game.
- If you want to go deeper, poke around the Player Cards and the Goalie dashboards — you'll start seeing the playoffs in a different shape.
It pairs really well with DailyPuck.com (Discovery #006 — daily NHL audio news). DailyPuck is the news. MoneyPuck is the math. Run them together and you basically have a free, self-serve hockey analytics desk.
This is the site that knows what the scoreboard doesn't. During the playoffs, use the math.