Bet $100 on the Maple Leafs every night for five seasons and you are down $613. Do the same with the average NHL team and you are down $1,808. The tax on Leafs fans is the one every bettor pays: the sportsbook's margin. Where Leafs backers did pay more: at the opening line and on the puck line.
Back any NHL team every night and you lose about 4.4 cents on the dollar.
A sportsbook does not price a game at its true odds. It shaves both sides, and that shave, the margin, averaged 4.1% on NHL moneylines over the five seasons we studied. Put $100 on every game of every team from 2021-22 to 2025-26, at the closing price, and the average team returned −4.4%. Only six of the 32 teams finished ahead.
The Maple Leafs finished 10th: −1.5%, or $613 lost on $41,000 staked. The Senators finished 19th at −4.4%, $1,784 down and within a tenth of a point of the league average. The closing odds implied 230.4 Toronto wins and 198.6 Ottawa wins. The teams won 234 and 198. Over five years, the market priced both Ontario teams almost exactly right.
$100 on the team to win every regular-season game, at the closing price. UTA includes the Arizona Coyotes' seasons. The seven Canadian teams together returned −4.1%, the 25 US teams −4.5%. Source: closing odds from ESPN's odds feed, results from ESPN. Calculation: Blue Line Picks.
Leafs backers were $1,091 ahead after four seasons. Then came 2025-26.
Toronto beat the market's expectation in three of the first four seasons: 54 wins when the odds implied 51, 52 when they implied 45. After opening night of 2025-26, a $100 bettor was $1,149 ahead. That was the high point. The Leafs won 32 of their 82 games that season and missed the playoffs, ending the NHL's longest active playoff streak. Over the season, the same bettor lost $1,704.
A team's return swings widely from year to year, which is the point: +13.0% one season, −20.8% the next. The only steady number in the table is the league's.
The grey line is the average team's pace: 4.4 cents lost per dollar, every game. Source: closing odds from ESPN's odds feed. Calculation: Blue Line Picks.
| Season | Leafs wins | Leafs return | Leafs, $100 a game | Senators wins | Senators return | Senators, $100 a game | NHL average |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | 54 | +3.0% | +$246 | 33 | −1.6% | −$128 | −5.3% |
| 2022-23 | 50 | +1.8% | +$152 | 39 | −8.2% | −$673 | −4.5% |
| 2023-24 | 46 | −4.5% | −$369 | 37 | −8.5% | −$696 | −4.6% |
| 2024-25 | 52 | +13.0% | +$1,063 | 45 | +2.4% | +$196 | −4.4% |
| 2025-26 | 32 | −20.8% | −$1,704 | 44 | −5.9% | −$483 | −3.3% |
| Five seasons | 234 | −1.5% | −$613 | 198 | −4.4% | −$1,784 | −4.4% |
82 games a season. Season amounts are rounded and may not add up exactly to the five-season total.
On the puck line, Toronto cost twice the league average.
The puck line asks the favourite to win by two goals or more, and pays the underdog's backers if it loses by one. League-wide it costs the same as the moneyline: −4.4% on both. For the Leafs it did not. Their puck line returned −8.8% over five seasons, $3,585 lost on $40,800 staked. Toronto was asked to give 1.5 goals in 294 games and covered 108 times. Five teams did worse on the puck line, and two seasons did most of the damage: −17.6% in 2023-24 and −25.9% in 2025-26.
For the Senators the two markets were close: −4.4% on the moneyline, −3.5% on the puck line. The 2025-26 season was hard on anyone giving goals. That season 43% of games were decided by a single goal, the highest share of the five seasons, and favourites giving 1.5 goals returned −15.6% across the league.
Puck line: the team's side of the 1.5-goal line, −1.5 or +1.5 as the sportsbook set it. 408 Leafs games and 410 Senators games have a puck line in the feed. Source: closing odds from ESPN's odds feed. Calculation: Blue Line Picks.
Between open and close, no team's price drifted further away.
Opening lines are in the feed from 2023-24. In those three seasons, covering 245 Leafs games, the closing price was longer on Toronto than the opening price 141 times and shorter 70 times. On average, the market's estimate of a Leafs win fell 1.1 percentage points between open and close, the largest drop of any of the 32 teams. A bettor who took Toronto at the opening price lost 6.4 cents per dollar. At the close, 4.3 cents. No other team's backers paid a bigger penalty for betting early.
That is what you would see if books opened a popular team short and the market corrected it. It is not proof. Injuries and goalie announcements also move prices during the day, and Toronto's 2025-26 slide produced plenty of bad news: the drift grew from 0.5 points in 2023-24 to 1.9 in 2025-26. Ottawa's price moved the other way, by 0.5 points toward the Senators.
Win probability is the moneyline with the sportsbook's margin removed. 3,915 regular-season games with both an opening and a closing line. Source: ESPN's odds feed. Calculation: Blue Line Picks.
38 Leafs playoff games, 18 wins, a return of −5.1%. Ten Senators games, two wins. Too few games to read anything into.
The Leafs returned −2.4% at home and −0.6% on the road. The Senators: −1.7% at home, −7.0% away.
Toronto was favoured in 285 of 410 games. Across all 410, the prices implied an average break-even win rate of 58.5%. It won 57.1%.
Over the hockey season, Ontarians bet about as much as a year earlier. They lost more of it.
iGaming Ontario publishes what the province's licensed operators take in each month. In 2025, Ontarians staked C$12.2 billion on sports and other betting, and operators kept C$816 million of it, or 6.7 cents per dollar. Over the 2025-26 hockey season, October to April, wagers rose 1% on the season before. The amount bettors lost rose 28%. These figures cover all betting, not hockey alone, and the share operators keep swings with results: it was 6.2, 5.9 and 5.6 cents in the three hockey seasons before.
Betting covers sports, esports, proposition and novelty bets and exchange betting. Cash wagers exclude bonus bets. Source: iGaming Ontario, Monthly Market Performance Data Tables, published 23 September 2026.
A shrinking slice. Betting was 21% of all online wagers in Ontario in 2022, 12% in 2025 and 8.7% in August 2026, its lowest month since the market opened in April 2022. Online casino takes almost all the rest.
Hockey's share is not published. The one split iGaming Ontario has released, for 2022-23, put hockey fourth at 9% of sports wagers, behind basketball (28%), soccer (15%) and football (14%).
A summer exception. June and July 2026, the months of the FIFA World Cup, were 35% and 44% above the same months of 2025.
You must be 19 or older to legally bet in Ontario. Gambling involves risk: please play responsibly. Need help? ConnexOntario: 1 866 531-2600, available 24/7, free and confidential. Gambling-related contacts to that helpline averaged 26.2 a month per million residents aged 15 and over after the private market opened in 2022, against 13.4 before the province offered online gambling (CMAJ, March 2026).
« The Leafs Tax » mesure ce que coûte un pari systématique sur les Maple Leafs de Toronto et les Sénateurs d'Ottawa. La méthode : 100 $ misés sur l'équipe à chaque match de saison régulière, de 2021-22 à 2025-26, à la cote de clôture.
Les écarts par équipe restent dans la marge d'erreur, sauf le mouvement des cotes entre ouverture et clôture. L'étude décrit des prix passés ; ce n'est pas un conseil de pari. 19 ans et plus en Ontario. Besoin d'aide ? ConnexOntario : 1 866 531-2600, 24 heures sur 24, gratuit et confidentiel.
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Four more charts can be embedded the same way: team returns, puck line, line movement and the Ontario market. Replace running-total with team-returns (height 1250), puck-line (690), line-movement (550) or ontario-market (660).
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