NHL daily betting guide: Opening moneyline projections for April 19

You'd have been more likely to get struck by lightning.

For bettors who backed underdogs over Easter weekend, that rare occurrence might have felt preferable to what happened from Friday night to Sunday night.

Out of the 22 contests, not one team priced with a plus sign on their moneyline managed to win. The closest thing to an underdog victory were road wins by the Sabres in Philadelphia and the Blues in Nashville in a pair of consensus pick'em games.

According to Moneypuck.com, the odds of Saturday's 14-0 sweep by the favorites were astronomic:

And that's before we add Friday's wins by the Islanders and Panthers or include Sunday's results.

The odds of being struck by lightning in your lifetime are 1 in 15,300, according to the National Weather Service.

What can bettors take from this run? It's probably just an incredible example of variance. However, you could make the case that the good NHL teams are more focused late in the season, having pushed through the dog days of February and March.

Where that argument slips is when a big favorite needs overtime or a shootout to get the win like the Maple Leafs did in Ottawa on Saturday or the Wild against the Sharks on Sunday. Those are two games in which the underdogs could have easily snapped the streak.

Supporting the narrative surrounding locked-in favorites and unenthused also-rans can be found in the Jets losing interest in a season slipping away after road losses to the Panthers on Friday and Lightning on Saturday.

There are also a few cases where the market knows more about certain matchups this late in the campaign. Games like Islanders-Canadiens, Wild-Blues, Flyers-Sabres, Blues-Predators, and Blue Jackets-Ducks might have seen the other team favored at the start of the season.

The NHL has 10 games slated for Tuesday, and half of those contests are between playoff teams and squads playing out the final stretch of the regular season. It's up to the bettor to decide whether it's worth attempting to measure motivation, even if there's clear underdog value on paper.

The recipe

Before the 2021-22 campaign, we devised a three-part series on how to use the regular-season point-total market to create team ratings, how to interpret home-ice advantage, and then how to use those to create your own moneylines.

This season's on-ice predictive metrics make up 90% of our total rating. Basing 10% of the ratings on preseason "priors" allows us to emphasize team metrics without going all-in on what's happened during this campaign, which is still a relatively small sample size that includes some tainted results from when COVID-19 ravaged lineups.

I also have a 5% win probability consideration for a side playing in the second game of a back-to-back with travel and 3% without travel.

How to use the guide

What follows is my fair price on the matchups (true moneyline) and the moneyline price I would need to bet on each side. I just need a 1% edge for a favorite if we're getting better than a fair price on the team more likely to win. For the underdog, I'll need 4% or better to make it a bet. You can establish your own threshold and may decide on a higher cutoff for bigger underdogs, like 6%-7%. On games I've projected could be a near coin flip, a 2.5% edge is enough to make a wager worthwhile.

Tuesday, April 19

Compare the "Price to Bet" column with the market's prices. From there, compile a list of bets. After you make your bets, come back before puck drop on game night to see if any line movements created a valuable bet that wasn't there before. At that point, compare the price of your opening bet to its late price to see how much closing-line value you may be getting.

Matt Russell is a betting writer for theScore. If there's a bad beat to be had, Matt will find it. Find him on Twitter @mrussauthentic.