Friday, September 27, 2013

Grantland: Who are the NHL's best long shot bets?

One fun part of any sport’s preseason is getting a first look at the bookmaker odds for various player props. It’s always an interesting insight into what the oddsmakers think about who’ll be the season’s statistical leaders and award winners, not to mention what they expect the betting public to think.

And while it can be fun to argue over the odds assigned to various players, there’s a part of me that’s always found it more interesting to look at the players who get left off the lists entirely. In betting terms, they make up “the field,” a nice way of saying “everyone else who we couldn’t even be bothered to put on this list.” If you’re the sort of fan who appreciates an underdog, it can be fun to go through the various props and try to figure out whether anyone who got snubbed could actually win.

So that’s what we’re going to do today: take five NHL player props, disqualify everyone who was considered a good enough bet to warrant any odds at all, and then try to pick a long-shot winner from the field. It’s a virtually impossible task, sure, but if wasting time arguing about sports on the Internet is wrong then I don’t want to be right.

(One note: Hockey player props are harder to find than other sports — on a recent Vegas trip, I only found one book that was offering anything at all — so we’ll turn to an online source and use the odds posted by Bodog. All lists are based on what was posted as of earlier this week.)

>> Read the full post on Grantland






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