Betting Heavy NHL Favorites January to April 2021

If you’ve been consistently betting $100 on heavy favorites (between -200 to -400 on the moneyline) throughout the 2021 season, you’ve been having moderate success depending on the venue/category. If a team is listed as -200, that carries a 67% implied probability of victory. If you want to invest in the puckline -1.5 goals to chase a bigger payout, you will generally get an implied probability around 44% (or +125). Home teams are far more likely to be a heavy favorite, with almost double the sample size as the visitors. Home ice advantage has been strangely cyclical, which may be a function of which teams are on extended homestands at any given moment. The chart below shows the cumulative results of betting $100 on either moneyline or puckline whenever it was being offered between Jan 13 and April 19, 2021.

If we are looking at the results, the most successful by far is home moneyline. You’d be up $767 through April 19th by hammering the heavy faves in their own barn (which is actually $300 less than you would have had at the end of March). The home puckline -1.5 was enjoying success earlier in the schedule before crashing and paying back all those gains in late March early April, with Detroit (6 times), Ottawa (5 times), Anaheim (4 times), and even Buffalo (3 times) being the primary drivers of the puckline spoilers versus heavy home favorites. The Tampa Bay Lightning have been the largest violator of home upsets, where they have long been the best team you can bet -1.5 goals at home. They certainly cost me some money. 

There was a period in early February where the road teams enjoyed incredible success, and significantly deflated those home profits. Then again in the first half of April, the visiting long shots have been covering +1.5 goals with greater frequency. We then had a gap of nearly a week without any big home favorites being offered. Tampa had a road trip, the Avalanche missed time with Covid, Toronto played good teams, etc. Then as February rolled over into March, there was a substantial increase in the number of teams being listed with a 67% implied win probability or higher. This could possibly be blamed on scheduling, but it was sustained throughout the month of March, this high density of heavy faves.

One key piece of data that’s missing from my spreadsheet is the total amount of money that all bettors are spending on each bet, across all sportsbooks and betting websites. How much money is the public laying down on each outcome? Based on line movements, my assumption is that bettors gravitate more to heavy favorites as the season gets longer. Not necessarily the “Sharps”, but certainly the more casual betting public. That’s after observing that the payouts on the heavy favorites tend to shrink over the course of the season (the same thing occurred in 2019/20). The closer we get to the end of the schedule, we’re seeing more lines in the -300 to -400 range.

I’m just speculating here, but I’m pretty sure those shifting line values have more to do with the quantity of total betting on those teams most likely to win; not because of increasing probability of victory. The sportsbooks don’t want to get cleaned out every time Colorado wins if 85% of the incoming bets are placed on the Avs. What they’ll do instead is nerf the payouts, and offer -350. At that price, you need to win 4 times to pay for 1 upset loss. That’s my theory as to why payouts shrink when probability of victory isn’t rising; that bettor habits gravitate increasingly to the best teams over the course of a season. Yet the probability of a hot goalie stealing any given game, even in a mismatch, is higher than your profitability threshold.

Where you’re really going to run into trouble (and where I have in the past) is smashing those goliaths when they’re on the road, most especially the puckline. It’s been a difficult task to train myself to stop taking those visitor pucklines -1.5. The visitor moneyline has been more successful, yet has stayed beneath the profit line since the first week of the season. It has gotten very close to a $0 cumulative balance in mid-April, but you’re still down for the season. A big reason for the positive April shift in road pucklines -1.5 is both Colorado and Vegas making successful trips to California to beat up on Anaheim and Los Angeles; accounting for 2/3 of puckline victories for heavy road favorites over the last 30 days.

If you are a hockey bettor, be aware that the best teams aren’t as lucrative as you might think, or as they were earlier in the schedule. Even growth in the home moneyline portfolio has been flat since mid-March. If you’ve noticed the diminishing payouts on the line offerings, you are correct. Be especially weary putting your money on the Tampa Bay Lightning, who have since moved Steven Stamkos to LTIR to join Nikita Kucherov. They’re still being favored in every game, often heavily favored, and they’ve only covered the puckline -1.5 goals 3 times in their last 14 games.