New, risky tactics wreak havoc on bookmakers' NHL playoff models

Besieged by sharp bettors who pounced on trending favorite bets and the over-goal totals during the NHL season, bookmakers hoped to breathe a postseason sigh of relief. 

“The playoffs recruit more recreational players, so that may defuse what we’ve suffered through,” Bally’s Interactive oddsmaker Jay Rood said this week. 

Just as the thought struck him, Rood reconsidered because recreational players typically gravitate to the favorite and over bets. 

Rood’s peers, including Tipico Sportsbook manager Sunny Gupta, can relate. Tipico is still growing its base of operation in Colorado — home of the Western Conference's top-seeded Avalanche. 

Confronting imposing future-book liability, because the Avalanche are Tipico’s favorite to win the Stanley Cup, bookmakers looked on in defeat as the Colorado Avalanche battered the Nashville Predators, 7-2, in Game 1 of their opening-round series Tuesday night. 

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“Our book and other books have been getting hit hard by the overs,” Gupta said as he inspected financial figures he could not divulge due to the sensitivity of their nature.

Sports betting websites who tracked season-long results, including covers.com and scoresandodds.com, reveal a staggering 65% of favorites won their games this season and 53% of games eclipsed the over total. 

Some of the more successful teams surpassing the over are still alive in the 16-team NHL playoffs — including the Florida Panthers (46-31-5 against the over), Washington Capitals (45-33-4), Minnesota Wild (47-33-2), Avalanche (44-36-2) and Las Vegas Golden Knights (46-33-2).  

Oddsmakers blame the plethora of overs hitting, on coaches like Minnesota’s Dean Evason, who led the trend of pulling the goalie early in surprise efforts to score with a man advantage. 

Through 33 games, the Wild scored 11 goals with an empty net. 

Nine teams ultimately scored 19 or more goals without a goaltender in their net this season, and all nine of those made the playoffs. 

“The pulling of the goalie earlier than usual became an industry trend and that aggression has resulted in increased scoring en masse,” Rood said. “We’ve tried to adjust.” 

The problem for oddsmakers has been with the programs that run their live betting models not adjusting rapidly enough during games to factor in this new high-risk trend. This not only fuels goals for the team with the extra player, but exposes them to surrendering goals with the empty net. 

“There’s been a large (player) performance on the totals markets … both totals have actually been under-performers for us,” Gupta said. “There were some periods we got hit really hard.” 

On top of that was the success of favorites, who won with 65% consistency both at home and on the road. 

During a record-setting stretch last month, 23 consecutive favorites won their games.

“I’m hopeful the trend doesn’t pan out in the playoffs now that the competition is evening out versus the way it was — so troublesome — when we had more haves versus have-nots,” Rood said. 

As sportsbooks like Tipico and Bally’s keep working to expand the states they operate in, they are at the mercy of an overflow of bets on their home-market teams. 

While Tipico closely observed Avalanche games, Rood was vulnerable in Canada, with the Toronto Maple Leafs (around 7/1) and Edmonton Oilers (around 22/1) representing their greatest liability with future-book bettors. 

The national Superbook identifies its greatest liability as the Florida Panthers, where it offers an online sports betting, and the Boston Bruins, where it doesn’t. 

“We’ve all seen that regional bias, and it exists for those who are in New York with the Rangers realizing a kind of renaissance this year,” Rood said. “Having a large nationwide footprint (of bettors) helps you spread out where the liability is.

"But we’re just not there yet.”