Locky’s NHL First Period Model, 3/6: The Bet You Never Want to See

Good morning!

Yesterday was really busy, and the model had some big success vs. the openers. The two largest edges, including more than 11% on the Stars-Rangers under, both won. Hopefully everyone was able to find some value over the course of the day.

Today the slate is much lighter with only four games, but features a bet that actually made me groan when it came up. There are basically no sides to almost any NHL team that I will groan at these days.

We have played Chicago unders and survived. We have played Dallas overs, and while that wasn't as fun, you just sort of do what the spreadsheet tells you at this point and trust the hypothesis it's working with.

For whatever reason though, a Ducks over just still makes me groan. And that's what we have today! Great!

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.

St. Louis Blues at Anaheim Ducks

10:05 p.m. ET

Anaheim-St. Louis is already being juiced so heavily to the under (-135 at open) that it has somehow created value on the over. On the surface, the price in the market makes sense: a low projected total in the full-game market creates implied low totals across the periods themselves. These are two of the lower-scoring teams in the league in general, so it's not like you'll find much resistance to the idea that this should be a snoozer.

What is compelling to note, with these two low-scoring teams, is that they have been pretty active in first periods this season. Anaheim doesn't score much overall, but it's basically about league-average in its goal distribution across periods. The Ducks aren't any MORE anemic offensively in the first than at any other time in the game.

The Blues, meanwhile, score 32.79% of their goals in the first, well above league average, and in the top 5 in the league in general. So although these are lower-scoring teams in a lower-scoring game, the distribution of the goals could potentially be out of whack, in a way that potentially creates value on the over in the first at this price.

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.