Home-Ice Advantage: Best Crowds in 2024-25 NHL Playoffs

Is home-ice, home-field, home-court advantage a real thing? 

Maybe the Myth Busters, Harvard PhDs, or the Boston Bruins in 2022 would disagree, but I would say it does. 

There’s nothing like seeing a home crowd lose their minds, scream until their lungs give out, and try to give their home team everything they can. 

While we’re only a few games into the NHL playoffs, a few crowds have already made their mark on opposing goaltenders and required ESPN or TNT to turn up the volume on their play-by-play microphones. 

Here are the five teams that, for my money, have had the best home crowds in this year’s playoffs. 

Best Crowds in 2024-25 NHL Playoffs

1. Winnipeg

Every team has done a whiteout — literally every high school, college, and professional team has done it once — but Winnipeg’s whiteout game in Game 1 of the playoffs was something else. 

When you get the opposing team’s head coach, Jim Montgomery, to call it out for impacting the game, you know you’ve done something special. 

St Louis’ Montgomery, a proud baldie, told reporters that his players were getting “blinded” by the white t-shirts reflecting off his head. 

Beyond just looking imposing as an all-white crowd — we’re strictly talking about shirts here — the more than 15,000 inside the building and thousands more taking in the game outside the stadium were enough to power the Jets to a comeback third period in the first game. 

You’d hardly notice from the noise that it’s the smallest capacity building in the NHL.

This Winnipeg fanbase hasn’t seen any major success for their franchise in its relatively short time in Manitoba, so having a historically dominant team this year to cheer for is helping to make an already hockey-obsessed town even more amped. 

Before I move on, I’d be remiss not to mention that Canada Life Center is an awfully strange name for a hockey arena. I understand that ‘Canada Life’ is an insurance company, but it’s still odd. To be clear, it still clears the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans. 

2. Montreal

One of my favorite pieces of NHL content is the Montreal-based HFTV. 

They take on a usually nauseating genre of internet content, man-on-the-street interviews, but turn it into a highly educational experience for the viewer about the environment at a Canadiens game.

If you haven’t checked out HFTV yet, it could be best described as the Quebecois equivalent of those ‘bing-bong’ videos that people were filming outside of Madison Square Garden New York Knicks games, except on HFTV, everyone’s screaming in French. 

Montreal’s Centre Bell is widely accepted as the best atmosphere for professional hockey. This fact is evident in the hockey media’s Tweets about Game 3 of the Habs’ opening round series. They’ve made it seem like the Capitals’ trip to Quebec will be like crossing into the hockey equivalent of the Mad Max Thunderdome. 

This Canadiens fanbase has been thirsty for some playoff action, given that their last major playoff run came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when fans were not present. 

Regardless of how these next two games against Washington go for Montreal, it’ll surely be a raucous return for playoff hockey in Centre Bell. 

3. Dallas

Staff at the American Airlines Center have to be relieved knowing they won’t have to deal with a fanbase in full revolt, constantly protesting against the team they’re watching, like they did with the Dallas Mavericks basketball fans after the Luka Doncic trade. 

Now, there are some happy fans in Dallas. And they’ve got a lot to be happy about with their team taking a 2-1 series lead after OT winning goals in games two and three.

Dallas also had one of the best ‘crowd pops’ of the playoffs after the OT winner in Game 2, paired with an electric “This series is tied!” call from Dallas’ play-by-play man Josh Bogorad.

Stars fans have crept into the upper echelon of fanbases, and the American Airlines Center has been labeled one of the more fun atmospheres in the league in recent years. 

Any crowd singing along to Creed’s “Higher” will earn that title for me. Their rendition in Game 1 sounded borderline angelic. 

4. Los Angeles

Los Angeles sports fans catch a lot of heat for many reasons — some legitimate, some less so. 

Lakers fans are looped in with Dallas Cowboys, New York Yankees, and Alabama Football fans as bandwagoners. Dodgers fans have this weird thing: they show up late and leave early for every game and acting like they’re the only fan base that has to fight traffic to get to their stadium. Their NFL teams do not have fans. 

But Los Angeles Kings fans have shown up in a great way to start this series against their new yearly rival, the Edmonton Oilers. 

Two main things drive their inclusion on this list: their hilarious treatment of Edmonton goalie Stuart Skinner in Game 2 and the Koreatown Senior Center’s harmonica rendition of the National Anthem in Games 1 and 2. 

Regarding their trolling of Skinner, the fans on Wednesday night chanted ‘We Want Skinner’ after the Oilers pulled him following a five-goals-allowed outing, which was preceded by a six-goals-allowed outing in Game 1. Every opposing fanbase trolls the goalie somewhat, but the fact that everyone in the Crypto.com Arena was involved is a sign of a great fanbase.

And then there was the harmonica anthem, which was, as the PA announcer said, “back by popular demand” after the first performance in Game 1. It may have moved up into the number one spot for greatest national anthem performances ever. 

To borrow a phrase from Colin Cowherd, “Hey Whitney Houston, the harmonica class at the Koreatown Senior and Community Center is here. We’re all good.”

5. Toronto

It’s been called corporate. It’s been classless. It’s also been called soulless. Personally, I can’t stand them. 

But the Toronto Maple Leafs home crowd is one of the better ones in the NHL.

Of course, this is only if the team isn’t losing or if there aren’t too many power-vest-clad businessmen sitting in the premium seats. 

Right now, in these playoffs, the Maple Leafs are doing well. So the fans inside the building and outside in the nightmarish and Kafkaesque Maple Leaf Square are happy. 

They’re the NHL’s most hated team and most hated fanbase, rightfully so in some ways because hockey media treats them much like the NFL media treats the Cowboys. But, as annoying as they are, they’re still a good fanbase. 

Poised for a good run in the absence of the Boston Bruins, the Maple Leafs fans should have a lot to cheer about. But, as soon as things turn, they’ll revert to their fair-weather tendencies.