Locky’s First Period NHL Model, 3/16: The Blackhawks? Really?
Dan Hamilton, USA Today Sports. Pictured: Alex DeBrincat
Good morning!
The model was pretty quiet yesterday, as we had only two small edges vs. openers that went 1-1 and not a lot of other things that materialized throughout the day.
Today has a chance to be much busier, with 12 games(!), including two early this afternoon. To my absolute shock, the largest edge vs. the openers is on the team that I never would have thought would show an edge at this point.
I'm betting a Blackhawks over.
A Reminder
If you’re new here, I built a model to handicap first-period over/unders in the NHL.
To provide the greatest value to you the bettor, each of these articles will include a downloadable Excel file at the bottom. In it, you can insert the line at your sportsbook of choice and see the bets that are — and aren’t — offering value, according to my model.
Now, that's been free money recently. The Blackhawks go over like humans breathe. It's just natural at this point. But most of the time the number is juiced like crazy, -240, -260 or higher.
Today though, many places have opened with something in the -175 to -180 range, and that quite honestly is too low.
Montreal (Chicago's opponent) scores more and allows more than the league-average percentage of goals in the first, so this isn't a situation like Dallas or Nashville where there is a resistant force pushing against Chicago's first-period aggressiveness. Rather, this seems a lot like business as usual. Now we'll see what happens on the ice.
Locky’s First-Period NHL Over/Unders: Full Slate Projections
Download the Excel doc to input odds from your sportsbooks. The table below is best viewed on a desktop computer.
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