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Happy Wednesday, and welcome back to a sports calendar, where everything keeps overlapping at once. The Olympic flame is still cooling, spring training is in full swing over in baseball, the NFL Draft Industrial Complex is already humming — and, of course, the NHL snaps back into action tonight after the longest planned midseason break in league history. We’ll have all the details you need to know about the impending hockey stretch below, plus one last nugget from the Milan Cortina Olympics, and there’s plenty else to follow in the world of sports as we look ahead to tonight and the rest of the week:
🗓️ TONIGHT’S DANCE
The Main Events
All listed times are Eastern.
NBA:
🏀 Thunder (27%) at Pistons (73%)* - 7:30 p.m.
🏀 Spurs (73%) at Raptors (27%) - 7:30 p.m.
🏀 Cavs (75%) at Bucks (25%) - 8 p.m.
🏀 Celtics (40%) at Nuggets (60%) - 10 p.m.
NHL:
🏒 Maple Leafs (33%) at Lightning (67%) - 7:30 p.m.
🏒 Kraken (40%) at Stars (60%) - 8 p.m.
🏒 Avalanche (53%) at Mammoth (47%) - 9 p.m.
🏒 Golden Knights (43%) at Kings (57%) - 10 p.m.
College Hoops:
🏀 St. John’s (32%) at UConn (68%) - 7 p.m.
🏀 Michigan (65%) at Ohio State (35%) - 8 p.m. (WBB)
Soccer:
⚽ Atalanta (45%) vs. Borussia Dortmund (32%) - 12:45 p.m. (Champions League)
⚽ Real Madrid (59%) vs. Benfica (21%) - 3 p.m. (Champions League)
🔍 FIND THE EDGE
The hockey homestretch
After many of its best players were off at the Olympics in Italy for the majority of the month, the NHL is back again tonight with eight games on the slate to begin what will be a seven-week sprint to the end of the regular season and the start of the playoffs.
It’s an open question what the rest of the 2025-26 season will hold, as my research found this was the longest planned midseason break in play in the league’s more than 100-year history:
Coming off comparable (if shorter) breaks in the past, games were more unpredictable down the stretch than they tended to be in normal, non-interrupted campaigns, so there could be more scrambling than usual in what’s already a tight battle in the standings during that seven-week race to the finish.
The good news is that the prediction markets should be pricing all of this in. So let’s take a tour through what they see in store down the final stretch of the schedule.
First things first, the Avalanche (25%) and Lightning (17%) are your Stanley Cup favorites: they collectively have a 42% chance to win it all, leaving only a little over half the pie for the rest of the league’s 30 teams combined:
There is some question about whether the Lightning should actually be ahead of the Avs, based on the teams’ difference in play heading into the break — and it’s not like Colorado’s top stars (like Team Canada standouts Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar) got a breather during the time off. But it’s also hard to gauge how much stock to put in pre-break momentum when the league was on pause for so long. So stay tuned there.
Another factor to consider is next Friday’s trade deadline, which could see a handful of notable veteran names on the move to bolster the Cup contenders above. Who might be in the market to buy or sell? That brings us to another prediction market, around the teams most (and least) likely to make the playoffs:
The teams above that eighth-place ranking in each conference are all likely keen on adding talent at the right price, as may be the teams just below that need reinforcements to make a final playoff push. With so many teams bunched up in the middle tier of the playoff odds — 14 teams sit between a 19% and 75% chance coming out of the break, of which only about half can actually make it in — it could create some fascinating dynamics over the next week and a half.
Adding to that factor is which teams are in that mix.
The two-time defending Cup champion Florida Panthers are at the bottom end of that group at just 28% — are they really going to miss the playoffs? Even lower are perennial contenders like the Maple Leafs (19%) and Jets (12%), which might need to sell at the deadline, to say nothing of teams like the Rangers, Flames, Blues, and Canucks, which have already started their fire sales.
And then, above or near the 50-50 line are such teams as the San Jose Sharks — whose teenage phenom Macklin Celebrini is gunning for an unlikely MVP by dragging his team to the cusp of a Cinderella playoff berth — and a trio of clubs (the Sabres, Red Wings, and Ducks) that haven’t made the playoffs in at least seven years, with Detroit not making it for nine years and Buffalo sitting on an NHL-record 14-year playoff drought. The market thinks all three teams have at least a 73% chance to end their playoff-less streaks, with the Sabres carrying a 75% shot to end a drought so long that a couple of players on the current roster were just 5 years old the last time they made it.
Hockey being hockey, chaos is surely in store over the next month and a half — especially with a compressed schedule, a looming trade deadline, and margins in the standings so thin that a single hot streak (or cold one) could flip the odds significantly from here. Buckle up!
📊 CHART OF THE DAY
9 out of 10 judges agree: Our skaters are great
The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina were, by most accounts, awesome. But that doesn’t mean they were without their share of controversies — one of which centered on the return of blatant nationalistic bias in figure skating judging. According to a Sportico analysis, 30 of the 36 judges for the ice dancing short programs scored skaters from their own country more favorably than those from other countries, as did 25 of the 29 judges for the long (or “free dance”) programs. This is despite the introduction of (theoretically) more rigorous and unbiased “technical” scoring reforms in response to the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics’ skating scandal, which saw French and Russian judges engage in quid pro quo scoring collusion to boost skaters from each other’s nations, as well as the use of “trimmed” means to remove outlier scores under the ISU Judging System. No matter what you do, it seems you can’t take bias out of a sport where perfection is still a matter of opinion.
❄️ STAY FROSTY
What else we’re reading
Smart, short reads we liked while building today’s odds.
🏀 “The Alijah Arenas Experience” by Quinn Fishburne
🏈 “Regularized Adjusted Plus-Minus (RAPM) Metrics For NFL Players” by Ray Carpenter
⚾ “The importance of MLB clubhouse vibes” by Mark Kolier
🏈 “Blathering Heights (Scouting Combine News ’n’ Notes)” by Mike Tanier
🏒 “I MIGHT Have a Solution to 3-on-3 OT Retreating” by GabArr
👀 EYES UP
Next on deck…
Thursday (2/26)
🏈 NFL: Draft Combine
🏀 NBA: Rockets at Magic
🏀 NBA: T-Wolves at Clippers
🏒 NHL: Flyers at Rangers
🏒 NHL: Oilers at Kings
🏀 MBB: Michigan State at Purdue
🏀 WBB: Georgia at Texas
🏀 WBB: Alabama at Vandy
🏀 WBB: Tennessee at LSU
⛳ Golf: Cognizant Classic in The Palm Beaches
Friday (2/27)
🏈 NFL: Draft Combine
🏀 NBA: Cavs at Pistons
🏀 NBA: Nuggets at Thunder
🏒 NHL: Sabres at Panthers
🏒 NHL: Golden Knights at Capitals
🏀 MBB: Michigan at Illinois
🏀 MBB: Miami (OH) at W. Michigan
⚽ EPL: Wolverhampton vs. Aston Villa
⛳ Golf: Cognizant Classic in The Palm Beaches
Saturday (2/28)
🏈 NFL: Draft Combine
🏀 NBA: Lakers at Warriors
🏀 NBA: Rockets at Heat
🏒 NHL: Red Wings at Hurricanes
🏒 NHL: Capitals at Canadiens
🏒 NHL: Sabres at Lightning
🏀 MBB: Virginia at Duke
🏀 MBB: Kansas at Arizona
🏀 MBB: Texas Tech at Iowa State
🏀 MBB: Arkansas at Florida
🏀 MBB: Alabama at Tennessee
🏀 WBB: Maryland at Michigan
⚽ EPL: AFC Bournemouth vs. Sunderland
⚽ EPL: Newcastle United vs. Everton
⛳ Golf: Cognizant Classic in The Palm Beaches
🧠 Looking ahead
Stay tuned for more updates and in-depth analysis of these events and more as they unfold. We’ll be bringing you all the scores, highlights, and expert commentary.
Got a favorite team or sport you want us to cover more? Let us know!
All data current as of time of send.
— by Neil Paine
*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.