Shorting Bad Goalies

This post is a chapter that was cut from my new book The Hockey Economist’s Betting Prospectus because the first draft was too long, but there were still some interesting conclusions worth reading. My book is a comprehensive commentary on the last 3 years of hockey betting, broken down by team, by category, by strategy, by season. There is plenty of useful information for bettors of all skill levels. It covers pre-pandemic, peak-pandemic, post-pandemic. What worked, what failed. Lessons learned, market trends, team-by-team analysis. What impact did the pandemic have on hockey betting? The market differences between these 3 seasons are discussed at length, and there's a lot to talk about. To read more, visit the Amazon store.

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Probably the two most profitable angles that I’ve deployed in this gambling experiment was betting Carter Hutton and Jimmy Howard to lose hockey games by more than a goal. Sure, I did not always know for sure they would be starting when my bets were logged, but both were playing behind terrible teams that I was also betting to lose when starting their other goalies. If it seemed likely or probable that Howard/Hutton was up next, the bet size could be increased, but for the most part I was laying down big money when the other goalie was in net too.

In 2019/20, Jimmy Howard won 2 games and lost 25 with an .882 SV%. Jonathan Bernier was easily the better goaltender, but the Wings still trotted Howard out on the ice for 27 starts because they weren’t actually trying to win. They were playing for ping pong balls in the draft lottery. That’s the biggest problem with sustaining this particular strategy with any given struggling goalie, most teams will just start putting the other goalie in net more often. That’s the key to sustainability, the team has to be tanking for a higher draft pick and unfazed by calling upon a struggling netminder.

I was a goaltender for 15 years of my life but certainly don’t profess to be any kind of guru at predicting their future outcomes. Though one of my best skills as a gambler seems to be sniffing out and exploiting bad goaltending. Riding a hot goalie can be an effective strategy, but so can shorting a cold one. I have often observed my best repeatable successes coming from betting really bad teams to lose, and not from picking the best teams to win.

In terms of quantifying this category, I created a leaderboard of the goalies that generated the most profit if you bet them to lose, as well as hypothesis testing a few models and charting them out over the course of each season. Logistically the biggest problem with all these models is that the market gets faster and faster at processing/adapting as information is released. I log all my bets for every game at the same time. I’m not waiting for starter confirmation, and if you do, the line will surely move once everyone piles on. You need to be good at researching game logs and correctly anticipating when your target will get the nod.

 

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, most models involving underdogs struggled in 2021 and 2022. Betting favorites against teams with sub .900 goaltending was one of my better models attempted. Reversing it and betting underdogs against good teams with weak goaltending did not yield good results over the 3 years combined. Keep in mind, teams with bad goaltending are less likely to win games, so you don’t see too many good teams with only bad goalies. 

When I’m laying action on nose-dives, it has led to some remarkable treasures, but you need to know when to stop. Shorting the Ottawa Senators was my best bet in January 2021, but all those profits were paid back when they pulled out of the nose-dive and I was still investing too heavily in their opponents. That happens, and you need to effective at knowing when to pull the plug on a short position. Quite often it’s a hot goalie that’s the most likely slump-buster (see Thatcher Demko).

When teams enter a tailspin, they’re almost always giving up too many goals. It can be difficult to differentiate how much of the blame rests on the team or the goaltender. I’m always trying to find bad goaltending during the season to give me an edge in fantasy hockey, so when goalies go cold, that gets reflected in my betting habits (even dating back to day 1 of this betting experiment). As a former goalie I feel obliged to mention that it’s relatively common for a goalie to struggle on one team, get traded or claimed off waivers, then immediately become fantastic for their new squad.

Sometimes the best goalie to bet against is not the same thing as the worst goalies to bet on. Tampa was generally still a heavy favorite whenever Curtis McElhinney got the nod, meaning there was a quality rate of return on the opponent (versus just losing your bet when McElhinney fails to win). It’s about rate of return. In neither season was it smart to bet money on John Gibson to win, but the payouts on his opponents to win was small because they tended to be big favorites. You’d lose a lot picking him to win repeatedly, but the profitably of his opponents are nerfed by low payouts.

The biggest problem with relying on a “bet the bad goalie” strategy is that teams can and do bench cold goaltenders. If a team’s cold streak is solely based on one bad goalie, that’s fixable. Play the other guy. It’s hard to really jump on a gatekeeper collapse because half the time the other goalie is better and wins the net. The most profitable confluence of events is when 1 team has 2 bad goalies or when a quality starter gets injured and the inferior back-up is thrust into the number one role for an indefinite period.

 

So who were my best goalies to bet against from Oct 2019 to May 2022? Number one on the list was Carter Hutton. I won $8,276 betting on his opponents over 3 seasons. But that was a potentially slippery slope, because the Sabres were a feisty team when Linus Ullmark started. You don’t always know which goalie is going to be starting until puck drop, and the line can shift once we know the inferior goaltender is starting. The reason I was able to reliably bet against Carter Hutton as often as I did was because most of it occurred while Ullmark was injured. Linus missed significant chunks of both Hutton’s Buffalo seasons. That removed most of the guess-work. Betting against teams whose best goalie gets injured should be a sub-chapter of this chapter.

My third best goalie to short was Jimmy Howard ($4,564), who posted an .882 SV% during the Wings historically bad season. Detroit was trying to get a higher draft pick, so they didn’t exactly mind that Jimmy was so terrible at the end of his career. They were playing for ping pong balls in the draft lottery. In a sane world, Jonathan Bernier would have been starting 65 games for the Wings that season, as he was a much better goaltender.

Sergei Bobrovsky was among my best goalies to short in 2019/20, but one of my best goalies to bet to win in 2021/22. That’s why it’s so important to be adaptable. I have won in the neighborhood of 7 fantasy hockey championships with Bob as my #1 goalie prior to his arrival in Florida. He was my guy for years that I always made sure to land in fantasy drafts. Over those years, I spent a substantial amount of time deciding whether or not it would be beneficial to start or bench Bobrovsky on my fantasy team game-by-game. I developed a strong instinct for determining if it was a high-risk situation for Bob’s specific set of skills. It’s not quantifiable, but instinctual. I might have had success when betting Bob to lose, but he was actually the 2nd worst goalie to bet against over these 3 seasons because his team was so good.

In 2021, I was able to pull a big profit when betting on Matt Murray to lose in Ottawa, most of that coming in the first month of the season. His play did stabilize. Carter Hutton entered the 2021/22 season as the starting goaltender for the Arizona Coyotes, and was abysmal. The Yotes clearly made a decision in the off-season to tank, shipping off all their goalies and signing Hutton. Sadly for bettors, Hutton was injured after just a few games, and never played again. His replacement was Karel Vejmelka, who proved capable of standing on his head and stealing games, at least every so often. It wasn’t every night. I made big money in Vejmelka’s first few weeks, but took my foot off the gas pedal when he started engineering upsets.