Do you record the times that it's not true as well? That's the other important part of your trail of evidence of overconfidence. Personally, I think it has more to do with parity in the league, and the overall difficulty in winning games even as the better team.
I think it may *seem* to be that a team is overconfident, when really it's just confirmation bias.
I don't know what you mean by the times that it is not true. All the games where neither team is
overconfident? The times when a team is overconfident, but wins anyway?
This subject really isn't rocket science. I don't think there is any way to pin it down scientifically.
I suspect that sometimes it is as you say. Game 6 against the Preds had the appearance of the Jets being overconfident, but I wouldn't be prepared to swear that was the case. As you say, parity. That was a case of 2 fairly evenly matched teams. You can really only identify the overconfidence thing when the 2 teams are an apparent mismatch and the underdog wins.
We don't have that here either, although it should not be as close as the Preds/Jets. VGK finished with only 5 fewer points than the Jets in the regular season. We can claim that they also had an easier division but they won 2 of 3 between the 2.
In any game in this series the losers may claim that their team was overconfident. No one will be able to either prove or disprove that. Given the parity between the teams it probably won't be true - but it might be true. Maybe VGK was overconfident yesterday, after disposing of LAK and SJS rather easily.