Both NHL Conference Final Favorites Lost Game 1 — and the 2026 Stanley Cup Board Just Got Blown Up

Both the Carolina Hurricanes and the Colorado Avalanche — the two favorites who walked into the 2026 NHL Conference Finals carrying the shortest Stanley Cup odds on the board — lost Game 1. Carolina, undefeated through two rounds at 8-0, was buried 6-2 by the Montreal Canadiens. Colorado, the championship favorite, dropped its opener 4-2 at home to the Vegas Golden Knights while franchise defenseman Cale Makar sat with an injury. In the span of 24 hours, the favored side lost in both series, and the 2026 Stanley Cup futures board got blown up.

Conference finals weekends do not usually look like this. The four teams left standing in any postseason are, by definition, good — but the betting market still expects the favorites to hold serve early, especially at home. Instead, the 2026 NHL Conference Finals opened with the chalk falling twice, and the ripple effect ran straight through the championship futures market. This is exactly the kind of mid-series repricing The Best Bet on Sports has tracked across all six major U.S. sportsbooks for more than twenty years — and the verified $367,520+ in profit our team has earned came largely from understanding what a result like this does to a line, and what it does not.

What Happened: Two Game 1 Upsets in 24 Hours

The Western Conference Final went first. On Wednesday, May 20, the Vegas Golden Knights walked into Ball Arena in Denver and beat the Colorado Avalanche 4-2 in Game 1. Carter Hart stopped 36 of 38 shots, Pavel Dorofeyev scored his playoff-leading 10th goal of the postseason, and Dylan Coghlan, Brett Howden, and Nic Dowd rounded out the scoring. Colorado, the Presidents'-caliber regular-season club and the betting favorite to win the Stanley Cup, lost its opener at home.

Then the Eastern Conference Final delivered a bigger shock. On Thursday, May 21, the Montreal Canadiens went into Lenovo Center and dismantled the Carolina Hurricanes 6-2. Montreal scored four times in the first period and never looked back. For Carolina, it was not just a loss — it was the first loss of the entire postseason.

Two series, two favorites, two Game 1 defeats. The market noticed immediately.

Carolina's 8-0 Playoff Run Is Over

The Carolina Hurricanes arrived in the conference finals having done something almost no team does: they had not lost a game. Carolina swept the Ottawa Senators in the first round and swept the Philadelphia Flyers in the second, building an 8-0 postseason record and a week-plus of rest before the Eastern Conference Final began. They were the second betting favorite to win the Cup behind only Colorado, and against Montreal they opened as heavy series favorites.

Game 1 erased the aura in 20 minutes. Montreal scored four goals in the first period and turned the rest of the night into a formality. Juraj Slafkovsky finished with two goals and an assist, Phillip Danault and Cole Caufield each added a goal and an assist, and captain Nick Suzuki distributed three assists. Goaltender Jakub Dobes turned aside 25 shots. At the other end, Frederik Andersen — who had been close to untouchable through Carolina's two sweeps — was beaten repeatedly, and the Hurricanes' perfect run was gone.

A 6-2 final in a conference final is not a coin-flip result. It is a statement. The question for bettors is whether it is a *sustainable* statement — and that is where the futures market and the series price start to diverge, which we will get to below.

Colorado Loses Game 1 — and the Cale Makar Question Looms

Colorado's loss carried a complication that Carolina's did not: the Avalanche may have been playing shorthanded, and may be shorthanded again.

Cale Makar — Colorado's best player and one of the best defensemen in the world — missed Game 1 of the Western Conference Final with an upper-body injury believed to date back to the Avalanche's second-round series against Minnesota. Head coach Jared Bednar offered no clarity afterward, telling reporters plainly, "No, I don't have an update." Colorado leaned on depth options Nick Blankenburg and Jack Ahcan to fill the blue line in Game 1, and Makar's status for Game 2 remained genuinely unsettled.

That matters for one specific reason: a Game 1 loss *with* your franchise defenseman out is a fundamentally different data point than a Game 1 loss at full strength. The first is partly explainable. The second is a warning. The betting market knows the difference, and it is pricing the Avalanche cautiously until Makar's status resolves — because if he returns, the Game 1 result reads as noise, and if he does not, Colorado's series price has further to fall.

How the Stanley Cup Futures Board Reshuffled

Here is the championship futures board, expressed as representative prices across the major U.S. sportsbooks, before the conference finals and after the Game 1 results:

| Stanley Cup Contender | Entering Conference Finals | After Game 1 | |---|---|---| | Colorado Avalanche | +130 (favorite) | +220 | | Carolina Hurricanes | +160 | +155 | | Vegas Golden Knights | +600 | +350 | | Montreal Canadiens | +700 | +600 |

The headline move is Colorado. The Avalanche entered the conference finals as the clear Stanley Cup favorite at +130 — roughly a 43% implied chance — and the Game 1 loss to Vegas pushed them out to +220, closer to 31%. Vegas, in turn, was cut nearly in half, from +600 to +350.

The board got messier on the Eastern side. The +155 number on Carolina was set in the window *between* Colorado's loss and Carolina's — the Hurricanes briefly inherited favorite status by default when the Avalanche stumbled. Then Carolina got blown out 6-2 the next night, and that +155 is now drifting back out as the market absorbs the result. Montreal, meanwhile, shortened from a +700 afterthought to +600. Futures repricing on a four-team board moves fast, and the number you see today is not the number that will be standing by puck drop of Game 2 in either series. That volatility is the opportunity — and the trap.

What a Game 1 Loss Actually Means

This is the part most casual bettors get wrong, in both directions. They either overreact — treating a Game 1 blowout as proof the series is decided — or they underreact, assuming a seven-game series is always a coin flip until someone clinches.

The historical reality sits in between. Long-run NHL playoff data tells a consistent story:

| Game 1 Result | Approx. Historical Series Win Rate for the Game 1 Winner | |---|---| | Wins Game 1 (home or road) | ~65% | | Wins Game 1 on the road | ~68% | | Trails 0-1 in the series | ~32-35% to recover and win |

A team that wins Game 1 of a best-of-seven goes on to win the series roughly two times out of three. When that Game 1 win comes *on the road* — as Montreal's did, and as Vegas's did — the signal is slightly stronger, because road wins are harder to manufacture by variance alone. So both Montreal and Vegas now hold a real, measurable edge.

But "roughly two-thirds" is not "decided." Roughly one team in three claws back from an 0-1 hole, and conference finalists — the four best teams left — sit at the higher end of that recovery band, not the lower one. The Game 1 score does not carry forward. Carolina's 6-2 loss counts the same in the standings as a 2-1 overtime loss would have. The blowout *feels* like a death sentence; statistically, it barely moves the series probability beyond the simple fact of being down 0-1.

The takeaway: respect the Game 1 result as a real shift, but do not let a lopsided score talk you into a number that prices the series as over. That gap — between how the result *feels* and what it *is* — is where the value lives.

The Betting Read on the Rest of the Conference Finals

Here is where the two series sit as betting markets:

Eastern Conference Final — Carolina vs. Montreal. Despite the 6-2 loss, Carolina remained the series favorite, with prices in the range of Carolina -275 and Montreal +225. The market is doing exactly what the historical data says it should: treating Game 1 as one game, not a verdict. Carolina was the better team on paper for two rounds, and one bad first period does not erase that. The live question is whether -275 is *too* much respect for a team that just got run out of its own building, or whether the price is fair value on a club that swept its way here. Montreal at +225 is not a throwaway ticket — it is a real underdog price on a team that just won a road Game 1.

Western Conference Final — Colorado vs. Vegas. This series was priced as a near coin flip even before Game 1 — Colorado around -115, Vegas around -105 — and the Game 1 result plus the Makar uncertainty have kept it tight. This is the cleaner handicapping puzzle of the two, because it hinges on a single concrete variable: Makar's availability. A bettor who has a read on his status before the line fully adjusts is operating with information the market has not finished pricing. That is the definition of an edge.

If you follow our NBA coverage, this will sound familiar — the same Game 1-upset-then-overcorrection pattern played out in the NBA Conference Finals, and it is the same dynamic that shows up every summer across our MLB analysis. Markets overreact to recent results in every sport. The discipline is the same everywhere.

Where the Live-Betting Edge Lives

Futures and series prices are the headline. They are not where our team makes its money.

The deepest mispricing in a series like this lives *in-game*. When a heavy favorite like Carolina trails early in Game 2, the live moneyline overcorrects — the market, still stinging from a 6-2 Game 1, prices the favorite as if the collapse is repeating, when the base rate says one bad game rarely becomes two. When Makar's status flips on a morning skate report, the Colorado live total and puck line move before the pregame number catches up. Those are the windows. They open for 60 to 180 seconds and they close.

That is the entire reason The Best Bet on Sports exists as a live-betting service, and it is the reason we have been limited at all six major U.S. sportsbooks — FanDuel, DraftKings, Caesars, BetMGM, Fanatics, and ESPN BET — for winning too much during in-game action. You can read the full breakdown of how we evaluate a service on our sports handicappers comparison page, and the receipts are on our verified results page.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Did both NHL Conference Final favorites really lose Game 1?

Yes. Both teams that entered the 2026 NHL Conference Finals carrying the shortest Stanley Cup odds lost their openers within 24 hours of each other. On May 20, the Vegas Golden Knights beat the Colorado Avalanche 4-2 at Ball Arena in the Western Conference Final. On May 21, the Montreal Canadiens beat the Carolina Hurricanes 6-2 at Lenovo Center in the Eastern Conference Final. Colorado was the Stanley Cup betting favorite entering the round, and Carolina was the second favorite, so the chalk fell in both series on consecutive nights.

How did Carolina's loss end its perfect playoff run?

The Carolina Hurricanes had not lost a game in the 2026 postseason before Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Final. They swept the Ottawa Senators in the first round and swept the Philadelphia Flyers in the second round, arriving at 8-0 with extra rest. The 6-2 loss to Montreal was their first defeat of the playoffs. Montreal scored four goals in the opening period, Juraj Slafkovsky had two goals and an assist, and goaltender Jakub Dobes made 25 saves. The blowout ended Carolina's perfect run but, statistically, only moved the series probability the amount that any 0-1 deficit does.

Is Cale Makar playing in Game 2 of the Western Conference Final?

Cale Makar's status was unresolved heading into Game 2. The Avalanche defenseman missed Game 1 of the Western Conference Final with an upper-body injury believed to trace back to Colorado's second-round series against Minnesota. Head coach Jared Bednar declined to provide a Game 2 update, and Colorado used depth defensemen Nick Blankenburg and Jack Ahcan in Game 1. Makar is one of the most important players on the board, so his availability is the single biggest swing factor in the series price — and bettors who get clarity before the market does hold a real informational edge.

Who is the favorite to win the 2026 Stanley Cup now?

The favorite picture is in flux. Colorado entered the conference finals as the clear Stanley Cup favorite around +130, but the Game 1 loss to Vegas pushed the Avalanche out toward +220. Carolina briefly inherited favorite status at roughly +155 in the window between the two Game 1 results, but the Hurricanes' own 6-2 loss to Montreal the next night caused that number to drift back out. With a four-team board repricing in real time, the most accurate answer is that there is no longer a dominant favorite — Colorado and Carolina sit closest to the top, with Vegas and Montreal both shortened after their wins.

What does a Game 1 loss mean for a playoff series?

Less than the score makes it feel. Historically, a team that wins Game 1 of a best-of-seven NHL series goes on to win the series roughly 65% of the time, and a team that wins Game 1 on the road wins it closer to 68%. That means a team trailing 0-1 still recovers and wins about one time in three — and conference finalists, the four strongest teams left, sit at the higher end of that recovery range. The margin of a Game 1 loss does not carry forward. Carolina's 6-2 defeat counts the same in the series as a one-goal loss would, which is why a lopsided final score is one of the most over-read numbers in playoff betting.

What are the NHL Conference Final series prices?

After Game 1, the Eastern Conference Final was priced with the Carolina Hurricanes as series favorites in the range of -275, with the Montreal Canadiens around +225 — the market treating the 6-2 result as a single game rather than a verdict. The Western Conference Final stayed close to a coin flip, with the Colorado Avalanche near -115 and the Vegas Golden Knights near -105, the tight number reflecting both the Game 1 result and the uncertainty around Cale Makar's availability. Series prices move with each game and with injury news, so these are snapshots, not fixed numbers.

How does The Best Bet on Sports approach NHL playoff betting?

The Best Bet on Sports has tracked NHL playoff markets across all six major U.S. sportsbooks since 2005, and the core of the approach is live, in-game betting rather than chasing pregame futures. Conference finals create the widest live-betting windows of the season — markets overcorrect when a heavy favorite trails early, and lines lag behind injury news like Cale Makar's status. Our team is limited at FanDuel, DraftKings, Caesars, BetMGM, Fanatics, and ESPN BET for winning too much on live betting, with a verified $367,520+ in profit. Live picks are delivered during games via Email, SMS, and Discord.