2023/24 Week 17 Betting Report

Week seventeen of the NHL season has been logged into the history books, as over/under proficiency continued underwriting my bad moneyline/puckline decisions. In my defense, it did feel like an unusually high confluence of bad luck slowing my growth, but that’s just an anecdotal unprovable observation. Washington upsetting Florida, Calgary upsetting Boston, Washington upsetting Boston, Islanders upsetting Leafs (okay maybe that one was a stretch). It helped that I’ve adopted a new bet size method proportional to my “Small Council” of OU advisors that also has a higher bet maximum than previous. If this proficiency persists, I may scale it up even further. Lean into what works.
 
Before we go any further, it’s time for my obligatory *DISCLAIMER* it needs be noted that I’m not betting with real money. These are all fictional wagers in a spreadsheet. My mission is to engage in a mass betting campaign, picking a winner of every single game, every over/under, because it provides a complete dataset for macroeconomic analysis, which can be shared with you, shedding light on what worked and what failed. I’m also tracking the results of betting every outcome, to help me (and you) uncover previously unknown or newly emerging profit vectors. What started as a thought experiment has evolved into much more.
 
My blog has been moved to Substack this season and I’m repeatedly encouraging everyone to sign-up for a free subscription to alleviate my dependence on Twitter for traffic. I’m concerned that Elon will follow through on his threat to charge everyone for Twitter and ostensibly destroy his own company. Subscribers receive an email notification each time a new post is published, and even if Twitter stays free, the algorithm likes to hide Tweets with links so you don’t leave. Subscribers will also receive weekly picks emails that are not posted on my blog. If you like what you see in the picks below, you can have many more delivered directly to your inbox.
 
My Weekly Profit: $175
My Season Profit: $6,767
 
This was a massive week for unders, which my Small Council was able to exploit for profit, but makes me look bad for noting that scoring had increased post-all-star break in previous seasons. Not this year. The theme of history failing to repeat continued, but that didn’t hurt my reconstructed Tailing History model, which doesn’t always bet the more profitable wager historically. It just takes the inputs and picks the ideal outputs, even when counter-intuitive. My concern after construction was that it might be built on a house of cards, but so far, the house is still standing.
 
Tails 2.0 is doing well enough in the 3rd quarter to earn a spot in my pick graphics, which will continue to fluctuate based on performance. The order by which they give their picks is now based on merit, using the Q3 leaderboard. Scroll down to the “Me vs Myself” section for more model commentary and our Tuesday picks. My Sunday Preview introduced 3 new models (one was just a reconstruction of an existing method), including my first ever over/under model which replaced the algorithm Formerly Known As Prime on my Small Council of advisors who continue excelling when working as a team.
 
What Happened This Week?
 
Looking deeper into the scoring related numbers, league save percentage was between .897 and .903 for 13 of the previous 16 weeks, before suddenly jumping up to .910 coming out of the all-star break. That’s the best weekly save percentage on the entire season (next closest was .906 in week 11 right before Christmas). Compounding the decline was a sharp drop in shots per game, which had been between 58.6 and 62.6 for the first 16 weeks before dropping all the way down to 55.8 in the last 7 days. Shooters were firing fewer shots by a considerable margin, and goalies were stopping more of them. Whether that’s permanent or just a freak post-all-star occurrence remains to be seen.
 
This statistical aberration was likely felt in the player prop market, with fewer overs hitting on average. One stat I’m not tracking is total time teams spent on the power play, so if there was a significant drop in PP time, that could account for the statistical shift we just saw. Anecdotally from the games I’ve been watching, there still appears to be plenty of penalties, and much more effort by individual players to convince the referee to call a penalty. It seems to be a team effort. You’ll see infractions where every player on the ice will collectively look at the refs and raise their hands to say “hey you gonna call that?” But we know refs ain’t gonna call games this way in the playoffs, when the whistles get put away.
 
The decrease in goal scoring really hurt favorites -1.5 goals, who had by far their highest output of the season in week 15, which helped convince me to start laying more on that demographic. Well, that spike was just temporary, but faves continue to outperform underdogs on the moneyline (if you bet $100 on each the last 3 weeks, you’re up $700). I’m laying off pucklines -1.5 for the week ahead, or at least until scoring rebounds and they start cashing again. Underdogs +1.5 goals have outperformed dog moneylines in 3 of the last 4 weeks, so a revival of that strategy from early 2nd quarter might be prudent.
 
 
My Team of the Week: Pittsburgh Penguins, +$842
 
The Pittsburgh Penguins are a team that’s been very difficult to read if you’re picking wins and losses, which didn’t get any easier in the past 7 days, but they were a big success story for my Small Council of over/under algorithms, which went 3-0 with big bets on their unders. Penguins unders are on fire and my OU team has been capitalizing. Now if only my team of models focusing on moneylines and pucklines could start improving the clarity of their forecasts, I’d be set. The Hedge Fund Composite is doing the best job of any picking Penguin wins and losses in the 3rd quarter, so maybe that’s the one I should be following.
 
My second best team of the week, the Minnesota Wild, played the Pittsburgh Penguins (so there is some covariance between them), and that’s no coincidence considering that was one of my best games of the week, making a max bet on the under (which was an empty net goal away from being a push) and taking the Minnesota ML (as I’m more inclined to do for their home games). The Penguins were on a back-to-back and it was Marc-Andre Fleury 1000 games appreciation night with a long opening ceremony. Competitive as I’m sure they are, I’m sure a few of his old teammates didn’t want to ruin Flower’s special night.
 
 
My Worst Team of the Week: Boston Bruins, -$1,109
 
What the Boston Bruins did this week really f**ked me up. They start by getting embarrassed on home ice by Calgary 4-1 after the Flames just traded their best center. Then they embarrassed the first place Canucks 4-0, and if you thought that big victory would build momentum, you were wrong. They were shutout on home ice 3-0 at the hands of the Washington Capitals, who had lost 6-straight games. Not sure how all that information should be absorbed from a forward-looking-strategy perspective. The Bruins certainly damaged the trust in our relationship this week, so maybe I’ll defer to the Hedge Fund for Bruins advice, since they seem to have performed the best under these conditions (they’re divided on tomorrow’s Bruins game).
 
The New York Rangers were my second worst team of the week, and have suddenly grown a comfortable lead on last place in my profitability rankings. It might be time to recuse myself from sharing picks for Rangers games, or at least provide a disclaimer. Granted, my losses came almost entirely from over/under, posting a substantial loss on both sides. When the back-up goalie has a .930 SV% in the last 30 days and the former Vezina winner is under .890, there’s going to be some wacky variance. Even my new Small Council couldn’t navigate this shit-storm while they were having an outstanding week.
 
 
My Week 17 Results
 
*Note* “Overall Market Bets” based on betting exactly $100 on every outcome.
 

This was an odd week from a category distribution perspective; with favorites outperforming underdogs on the moneyline, but dogs vastly outperforming their superiors on the puckline, with dogs +1.5 among the best, and favorites -1.5 nearly the worst of all. Only overs were a bigger loser in week 17. My models collectively lost $10,000 on faves -1.5, but still produced a net profit across all categories, so we’ll take that as a win (aside from Maximus being wounded in battle). Unders were my big winner and home moneylines between -109 and -149, but my own success and failure becomes much clearer when you see the team-by-team leaderboards below.
 

My worst team to bet on includes multiple favorites to win the Stanley Cup, but it’s not all “bad beats” considering last season’s Stanley Cup finalists and President’s Trophy winner were on my worst teams to bet against list. But it was my belief that Calgary would be worse without Lindholm and Philadelphia would continue their downward spiral that did the most damage next to Boston. There were several teams who were good under bets, and few who were good overs. That tends to happen when unders go 24-13-1. If you bet $100 on each, you banked $909. Exactly zero lines opened at 7 this week, as books are compensating quickly for declining scoring.

 
Team By Team Profitability Rankings

These profitability rankings are based on the sum of all my bets per team, including where the money was won or lost. Each week my new Profitability Rankings will be based on all the games in the season, not just what happened this week. 
 

The Colorado Avalanche maintain first place in my profitability rankings despite having a rough week and possibly losing Nathan MacKinnon to injury. While the Dallas Stars are charging up the leaderboard.
 
Me vs Myself
 
The “Me vs Myself” section outlines my competition against my betting models, in my vain attempt to prove my own decision making is superior to the models that I’ve created. Me vs my creations. If you are new here and don’t know how the rest of the models work, there’s a link for that. Below is the tournament leaderboard for the second half of the season.

  
The biggest news in my tournament for the next top model is that my previously beloved Max Profit (aka Maximus) model suddenly fell on hard times, finishing in dead last this week, falling far back in Q3 rankings. The concerning angle is that it was a big loser on both underdogs and favorites moneyline, which was not unlike my own results. Part of that might have been due to how often I had been tailing Maximus, but I’m starting to lean more on the aggregator, or at least looking at the total amount that all my models bet on everything, which is now also being displayed in my pick graphics (sorry to anyone who misses the short-term Fair Line Estimator).
 
My Goalies vs Teams model was terminated and replaced with Game Sum 2.0 (introduced yesterday), after GvT 3rd quarter losses sunk below $7,000. That likely means the original version would be crushing the 3rd quarter, but that concept was proven so unstable flipping the picks and betting opposite proved profitable, at least in a smaller sample. Besides, now I can unplug my main worksheet from my goalie game log spreadsheet (which is massive) and was likely a big reason my entire spreadsheet performance is slowing down. Impressive job by my Hedge Fund this week, as betting so-called “negative value” was an excellent method to choose between favorites and underdogs, which confounded Maximus.
 
Shorting Goalies is now in first place for the quarter, emerging as my most successful Hedge Fund member. Below is a table showing model performance by category. I’ll include Maximus just to let ya’ll see what went wrong. Also, you can see what the new version of Tailing History is doing right. Those stats were just for the previous 7 days.

Here are my picks tomorrow, providing at least one pick for every game. I’ll probably be sending out a picks email exclusively to my free subscribers on Saturday, and if not I’ll just Tweet my favorite picks. Get those and all my future picks delivered directly to your inbox be subscribing at a cost of $0.
 
 
ANA @ MTL:
 

Montreal and Anaheim have won the same number of games in their last 10 (4), while the Ducks have been a better team on the road and Habs worse at home this season. That’s the primary reason I’m unwilling to pay -142 for the Montreal ML, but that’s also why my Hedge Fund loves that same line. If it’s -142 instead of the +113 they think it deserves, then they assume the books have an angle that strongly favors that team. They don’t need to know what the angle is, they just react to the line price being off. My models are going 48% Habs ML and 36% Ducks +1.5 goals. Dogs +1.5 just had a really good week and it’s been a few since I’ve bet one, so let’s start here at -218. Also give me over 6 goals, which had strong 4-1 support from the Small Council.
 
 
LA @ BUF:
 

My problem with making a pick on this game 30ish hours before puck drop is that the goalies have not been announced, and that’s important. Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen has been excellent for Buffalo, but there’s no way I’d want a penny on Buffalo if he does not start. For LA, Dave Rittich has a .932 SV% last 30 days while Talbot is at a miserable .827.The risk of Talbot limits how much I’m willing to lay on the Kings, who my models love. They’re going heavy on Kings -1.5 goals but I’ve pumped the brakes on faves -1.5 and can’t tail that position. I’ll put a minimum bet on Kings ML at -148 with the team winning back-to-back, including an impressive 4-0 win against Edmonton in the first game under the new coach. I also really like under 6 goals, but would not bet that if it’s Talbot vs Comrie (which I do think is unlikely, but not impossible it’s those two).
 
COL @ WSH:
 

Nathan MacKinnon left the Avs previous game with a face injury, but is expected to play tomorrow. He’s currently on a 3-game pointless streak which uncoincidentally coincides with the Avs 4-game losing streak. But you also know what that means, Nathan MacKinnon is angry. My models are 79% on Colorado but none of us are performing well betting Avs on the road (and to a lesser extent shorting Washington at home) in the last 30 days. If you think that losing streak puts value on Caps +140, remember that they’ve also lost 7 of their last 8 games, and betting against angry MacKinnon can be terrifying if you’re going to be watching the game. My Small Council loves over 6 goals too.
 
 
CBJ @ OTT:
 

The Ottawa Senators have won 6 of their last 10 games while Columbus won just 3. That’s part of the reason that my models are putting 72% of their money on the Senators, mostly -192 on the moneyline. While Sens have improved, I’m not -192 confident in this team quite yet. At least Korpisalo has settled down and is playing average. I’m just going to put a minimum bet on BJs +1.5 goals, since that’s a category I’m actively trying to bet more often. It’s just me and Tails, who has been doing well on this pick last 30 days. My Small Council voted 4-1 at over 6.5 goals, but they’d mostly bet the under if that moves to 7. My OU model makes max bets on the under every time the total is at 7 (opening line at least).
 
STL @ TOR:

The St. Louis Blues have won 7 of their last 8 games and 5 of those wins were on the road. The +164 ML number raised my eyebrow and didn’t take me long to settle on that choice. Both goalies have been playing well, so it doesn’t matter who gets the start. The Leafs haven’t exactly been cold, going 5-3 in their last 8, but I’m not paying -192 on a moneyline for a team that has been worse than their opponent last 3 weeks. I’m just making a minimum bet, and do have a few tailing (the top models prefer Blues +1.5 goals which is a safer bet, but I’ll live dangerously because Blues are hot). I’m taking over 6.5 goals, but that passed with a minority vote. The dissenting opinions are expecting around 6 goals (Game Sum bets off profit, not the average last 30 days). This might be a stay away.
 
 
TB @ BOS:
 
I’m coming off a terrible week betting Boston games, so I’ll abstain from sharing my pick for this one. However, I’ll just mention that there was a 5-0 vote from the Small Council on under 6.5 goals. My Hedge Fund does the best job betting Bruins, but they’re split on this game. My other models are also split.
 
 
SEA @ NYI:

The Seattle Kraken are going to be playing a back-to-back, so if Daccord is the starter tonight, we should be seeing Phillip Grubauer in his first start in months (keep an eye on who is starting tonight), because I love the Islanders ML at -148 if it’s Grubauer, but only “like” the Islanders if it’s Daccord. Yet I’m expecting Sorokin in net for the Isles, and he’s been trending upwards since Patrick Roy took control of the team (my models are 94% on NYI). Regardless of the goalie match-up, I’ll be taking over 6 goals, which received 4-1 support from the Council.
 
 
CAR @ DAL:
 

At first glance this looked like a candidate to skip revealing my pick, as both these teams are good and picking a side initially felt difficult. But after seeing my model selections, my choice became clearer. I’ll tail on the Dallas ML -120, but am only putting a minimum bet. You could also sell me on Canes +1.5 goals. I’m also tailing my Small Council with over 6.5 goals, but that doesn’t feel safe with where the league has been trending, so I’m not strongly endorsing that pick.
 
 
NJ @ NSH:
 

The biggest news for this game is that Vitek Vanecek is suddenly day-to-day with an injury, 2 days after joining one of my fantasy teams. He’s been their most reliable goalie in the last 30 days, so there’s no way I’m betting them on the second leg of a back-to-back with Akira Schmid in net. My models are 86% invested in the Predators ML at -115 (which has moved to -122), so that’s going to be my pick too. The Small Council is taking under 6 goals, but that’s a dangerous bet if the Devils offense gets rolling and the back-up is protecting their net.
 
VAN @ CHI:
 

The Canucks are playing the 5th and final game of a compressed road trip, which is why Shorting Travel is jumping in with a max bet on Blackhawks -1.5 goals (around +500). A few of my other models have interest in the Hawks but a large majority of the money is on Vancouver. I’m taking the Canucks ML at -305, but will refrain from a max bet because of the 5 games in 8 days. Also, they play Detroit in their next home game and in the last 4 seasons, Canucks are one of the worst teams when returning from long roadies. Remember that one for Thursday. I’m also comfortably taking under 6 goals hoping the Vancouver legs are getting a little gassed (the model took the over but hasn’t been doing well with that lately).
 
DET @ EDM:
 

The Edmonton Oilers have lost 2 of their last 3 games, but that doesn’t mean that I’m pressing the panic button. They’re still elite, and my models are investing more than 70% on striking oil tomorrow. I’m just going to make a minimum bet on Detroit +1.5 goals because more of my better performing models slightly prefer Detroit (though a few are losing money on that bet last 30 days). Note that the models betting Detroit are making smaller bets than those preferring Edmonton. I’ll be betting triple that amount on under 6.5 goals.