No. A game in hand means a match that hasn’t been played yet when rivals have already played the equivalent.
If hockey team A has won 36 games out of 52, and team B has won 35 games out of 50, team B may be behind in the current standings but have two games in hand.
No, it doesn’t match up with the “bird in the hand” colloquialism.
Nope. Having to do *more *than the other team, like win one more game, is the *opposite *of having anything in hand. “In hand” means you’ve almost achieved something, such as finishing ahead of the other team.
You are, sir, incorrect in your understanding of the application of the phrase “game in hand” to sports situations under discussion.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/a-game-in-hand
Indeed. Think of the games of a season as tokens which are being spent. If you have played one less game, that means you have spent one less token and therefore have one more in your hand than the other person.
Btw, league tables are less spoken of, but how far a team is from the top team in the division or a playoff spot is very much spoken about. So it’s different.
I never see the “in hand” (or equivalent) mentioned in standings for American sports (football is the only one I follow closely, though I casually follow baseball). But it sure would be… handy. (Sorry.) I have to guess, so if one football team is 9-2 and the other is 8-2 I assume the 8-2 has played one fewer game (either they had their bye week and the other didn’t, or they haven’t played this week’s game yet). It would be nice to not have to do that quick mental math all the time and have it spelled out explicitly.
I hear it occasionally in relation to baseball, particularly when you get to the last quarter of the season, and there’s a tight divisional race (though it’s not always worded precisely as “in hand”).
In the NFL, once a week’s games have been played there’s never a gap of more than one game played from team to team, and even that gap vanishes for the last month of the season (as all of the teams have taken their bye week by then).
Conversely, in MLB, because games are scheduled on a daily basis, the timing of days off for teams varies, and (maybe more importantly) because rainouts are sometimes not rescheduled for months (if at all), it’s not uncommon to see larger differences in the numbers of games played from team to team.
It doesn’t really work in football (or basketball or baseball), since points don’t really matter. All that matters is your record. For the sake of this discussion let’s leave football ties out of it. If Team A is 11-4 and Team B is 12-4, you know Team A needs to win their last game to match Team B’s record.
In hockey, points matter. So if you’re near the end of the season and Boston has played one fewer game than Montreal, but they have the same number of points then they have a “Game in hand”. Boston has one more game in which to score a point (either by winning or losing in a shootout). There’s no guarantee they’ll end up ahead of Montreal in the standings, but they have an opportunity.
+1
Team A … Played 10, Win 7, Draw 1, Loss 2, Pts 30
Team B … Played 9, Win 7, Draw 1, Loss 1, Pts 30
Team C … Played 8, Win 7, Draw 1, Loss 0 Pts 30
Team A has “played an extra game”
Team B has “a game in hand”
Team C has “two games in hand”
I’ve never heard “in hand” and the closest I can think of is being half a game back.
True, but with games on Sunday, Thursday, and Monday (and sometimes Saturday once college football ends regular season games) you can lose track. And I’m sure it happens where Team A hasn’t had a bye week and played on Thursday, and Team B had a bye week and plays on Monday, and you check the schedule on Sunday and see that Team A is 4-2 and Team B is 4-0. So it can seem weird temporarily with a two game gap. 
True, the important thing is win percentage, so it doesn’t matter as far as standings go. But it’d be nice to know I guess.
Seems I wasn’t the only one not understanding the term “in hand”. Thanks for the ignorance fighting!
Perhaps you’ve never noticed it, but I hear it all the time at the end of the MLB, NBA and NHL seasons, when teams competing for playoff spots have a mismatch in number of games left. If you regularly watch these sports, I guarantee that you’ll notice it next time. It’s one of those phrases that you start hearing all time after never noticing it before (kind of like after noticing the arrow in the FedEx symbol). I predict this will happen during the last week of March.
But with the knowledge that all teams will have played the same number of games at the end of the season, “games in hand” allow one team more opportunity to improve its win percentage, and by a greater margin, versus its competition. That’s what makes it an important and significant variable.