Welcome to my Week 17 NHL Betting Report, featuring my Gambling Power Rankings, results by category, my best bets, and my best/worst teams to bet on or against. It should be noted that I’m not betting with real money. These are all fictional wagers in a spreadsheet. If you’re betting with real money, you should not be betting on every game, only the games you like the most. Whereas I’m betting on every game, every over/under, because it provides a complete dataset for macroeconomic analysis. Click here to see my Week 16 Betting Report, or visit my second Quarterly Report for more in-depth team by team analysis.
My Season Profit: $17,702
One trend that started shortly after the Omicron wave hit the NHL, was lofty profits on favorites, both moneyline and puckline. From Dec 20 to Jan 30, this demographic was red-hot, and played a major role in fueling my own success. In February favorites hit a brick wall, and underdogs have been cashing tickets. This would have hit me harder last week had the Montreal Canadiens not been reliably terrible. Well, that particular trend reversed in week 17, and I got caught on the tracks. Thursday was a disastrous night, headlined by the last place Montreal Canadiens upsetting the St. Louis Blues.
After Saturday’s games, I was down -$978, but laid $3,500 on the Sunday slate. All the money was on favorites, with the exception of Minnesota and Carolina who arguably should have been favored. Also, 6 of 8 Sunday bets were on the road team. Thanks to the Blue Jackets, Panthers, Wild, Rangers, Hurricanes, and Knights winning on Sunday, I was able to climb slightly above zero for the week. Although most of the credit for my modest weekly profit goes to overs, as the NHL experienced its second highest scoring week of the season (more on over/under below).
Not only has there been increasing profitability on underdogs, but also road teams. Those two things are not unrelated, given that home teams tend to be favored. There was an abnormally high home winning percentage in the first half, but road teams won 65% of games this week. If you bet $100 on every visitor moneyline since January 24, you are up slightly more than $2,000. Who is responsible for this trend of increasingly successful road warriors? Since Jan 24, the Edmonton Oilers have 6 road wins, while Columbus, Florida, Washington and Los Angeles all have 5 each. All it takes is a handful of teams to get hot on the road at the same time, and suddenly you’ve got a trend.
This doesn’t mean you should start betting every road team to win every game going forward. Edmonton and Washington have been strong road teams in past seasons, so we have seen them do this before. Whereas Columbus and LA are a little more fluky. The Washington Capitals have won 5 consecutive road games and lost 5 consecutive home games, so they are helping drive this trend on both sides. Not only did a few visiting teams get hot since Jan 24, but the two squads who played the most home games were Montreal and Ottawa, losing 14 of 19 (with Pittsburgh also losing 5 of their last 6 at home). The Habs and Senators had to make up for postponed home games earlier in the schedule, so that component won't repeat itself going forward.
In other news, during the All-Star break I decided to start tracking line movement, and some of the early results were encouraging. When a line “moves towards” a team, that basically means that the payout is shrinking because that team is soliciting a disproportionate amount of bettor’s money. Most of my bets are recorded around noon Pacific time the day before games, so I’ve been using Draft Kings often because they release a complete set of lines earlier than most. As part of this investigation, I’m recording which Sportsbook the line came from, along with the final closing line from that book before puck drop.
The sample is still too small to dig deep, but the
early results suggest that the line will move towards the eventual winner in
54% of games. If you can successfully predict which direction the line will
move (which is easier said than done), the rate of return on the opening line
is 9.6% and the return on the closing line is 2.9%. I was expecting that
closing line return to be closer to zero, under the assumption that Sportsbooks
know how to adequately neutralize a line when it’s taking too much money. I’m
expecting the closing line profitability to approach zero as the sample grows,
but if it holds, there are exciting ramifications.
My Week 17 Results
*Note* “Market Return” is based on betting exactly
$100 on every outcome.
The goals keep coming and the overs continue cashing. My latest over/under algorithm (detailed in previous reports) proved very efficient at picking overs and mildly bad at picking unders. Given that goal scoring continued to prevail, it produced a profit. Thankfully there were more overs than unders. My new algorithm is up $1,500 in 2 weeks, but only because of all these goals. The two outcomes it recommended that lost the most money was Montreal overs and Edmonton unders, two teams that reversed previous scoring trends.
While both my algorithms have produced positive profit for their existence, I can already see that it’s vulnerable to shifting trends. If defense tightens up at any point in the near future and goal scoring decreases even moderately, I’m going to have a really bad 1-2 weeks before the numbers can compensate. Admittedly this is my first season doing over/under betting, so I’m still workshopping the best strategy. The new version only cares about each team’s last 5 games, the other 10 games. Sometimes a longer memory is a good thing, sometimes it’s bad thing.
My Team of the Week: Columbus Blue Jackets, +$787
The Blue Jackets captured my team of the week honors, nudged past the finish line by their victory vs Buffalo on Sunday. Columbus won 2 of 3 games for the week, but it wasn’t wins or losses that propelled them to my top spot, but rather BJ overs. If you’ve been reading my reports all season, you’ll know that Columbus overs have been among my best O/U bets for the full season (they are currently #1). They are the perfect confluence of quality goal scoring and porous defense that you want to see in a good “over” investment. My algorithms have recommended the Columbus over 18 times in their last 19 GP.
When you can’t rely on bad teams being bad, you better find a hot team to safely invest your money. Few in the NHL are hotter than the Calgary Flames. They’re on fire in every sense of the word and carried me early in the week, but fell just short of #1. They at least deserve an honorable mention here.
My Worst Team of the Week: Montreal Canadiens and St. Louis Blues, -$1,900
We had a tie this week for biggest terd in the toilet bowl, which is not a huge coincidence given that my most disastrous loss of the week by far was Montreal upsetting the St. Louis Blues on Thursday night. Look, I’ve been here with St. Louis before. They can just as easily lose to a bad team as beat a good team. That’s the problem. They faced Toronto on Saturday, and I knew it was a trap game. The Blues have caught me in this deceit before. I Tweeted an ominous warning and neglected to take my own advice, placing a $500 wager on the Leafs.
Of course I placed a large wager on Toronto to beat St. Louis and of course the Blues won because that's what the Blues do. You can't trust them to win or lose reliably. I tried to warn myself but refused to listen to myself... 🤦♂️ #NHLBetting https://t.co/X0QoHtwLIC
— Hockey Economist (@Hockeconomics) February 20, 2022
The Habs followed up their win versus St. Louis by beating
the New York Islanders on Sunday. Anytime the last place team in the NHL wins
multiple games in the same week, you can expect it’s going to hit me hard.
Betting on the worst teams to lose has always been my bread and butter. Last week,
Montreal was my most profitable squad, banking over $1,600 from their losses.
That was more than reclaimed 7 days later. I’ll be upset if Marty St. Louis
turns this team around. We had a good thing going. Come on Marty, losing is the
Wright thing to do…
2) Over: +$1,007 2) Edmonton to win ML+PL: +$654
3) Calgary to win ML: +$547 3) Montreal to win ML+PL: +$595
2) Home moneyline: -$1,475 2) Under: -$905
3) St. Louis to win ML+PL: -$1,000 3) Florida to lose ML+PL: -$600
My Best Teams To Bet On In Week 17: (over/under not
included)
1) Calgary Flames, (+$547)
2) Colorado Avalanche, (+$311)
3) Florida Panthers, (+$250)
My Worst Teams To Bet On In Week
17: (over/under not included)
1) St. Louis Blues, (-$1,000)
2) New York Islanders, (-$670)
3) Dallas Stars, (-$321)
My Best Teams To Bet Against In Week
17: (over/under not included)
1) Vegas Golden Knights, (+$525)
2) Seattle Kraken, (+$492)
3) Chicago Blackhawks, (+$389)
My Worst Teams To Bet Against In Week
17: (over/under not included)
1) Montreal Canadiens, (-$1,500)
2) St. Louis Blues, (-$600)
3) Dallas Stars, (-$500)
Team By Team Power
Rankings
These power rankings are based on the sum of all my bets per team, including
where the money was won or lost. Each week my new power rankings will be based
on all the games in the season, not just what happened this week.
No comments:
Post a Comment