Locky’s NHL First Period Model, 4/2: Lightning Often Create the Perfect Storm

Locky’s NHL First Period Model, 4/2: Lightning Often Create the Perfect Storm article feature image
Credit:

Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports. Pictured: Andrei Vasilevskiy

Good morning!

In the model's triumphant return yesterday, we had a lot of success vs. the openers, going 4-1. Today there are even more games, so let's see what we can find.

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.


Perfect Storm 

The largest edge comes, unsurprisingly, in a game featuring the Lightning.

Tampa is obviously a very prolific goal-scoring team, having the most goals in the league. But their distribution of those goals, and of those they allow, is the compelling factor here. They score 32.7% of their goals in the first period (league average right now is about 29.3%), and they crazily enough allow 37.5% of their goals in the first period!

Now, that's different than allowing a lot of goals. Basically, whatever they're going to allow, they do it early. But those combinations of percentages are almost always going to create value when they play a team with an average-to-above-average first-period profile as an opponent. In this case, Montreal is quite average, and that's enough.

That combination of two teams is almost always going to produce value vs. the market price using this hypothesis.


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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