Prospective measures of competitive balance application to money lines in the national hockey league

The authors have previously introduced the concept of utilizing point spreads to measure competitive balance in professional sports and a methodology for doing so. They assessed competitive balance in the National Football League and the National Basketball Association. This methodology was extended to measuring competitive balance utilizing money lines in major league baseball. This study starts by applying the same model to the money lines for the 2005–2015 seasons to measure competitive balance in the National Hockey League. It then statistically adjusts the money lines under various scenarios to estimate the effects of overtime rules and shootouts on competitive balance. Similar analyses of overtime effects on competitive balance of other sports are also completed for comparison purposes. The results indicate that competitive balance in the National Hockey League increased rather substantially during this period and that overtime rules and shootouts have had a much larger positive impact on competitive balance in the NHL than overtime approaches have had on the competitive balance of any of the other sports examined.