NHL Playoff Games and Popular Picks to Win: Florida vs Tampa Bay Game 1 and Wednesday Night Previews

We wind up comparing a lot of sports leagues without thinking of whether the mold fits our prognostications. Often, 2 leagues that look and sound much alike, for instance MLB and Nippon Professional Baseball, present very disparate betting circumstances and trends. Meanwhile, sports that seem unrelated, like NASCAR and PGA Tour golf, wind up sharing a lot in common in sportsbook odds, right down to the late-season “points chases.”

Hockey and golf are also closely-related in some weird ways. No other sport’s athletes are as encouraged to play golf, not even the aging NBA and NFL players who’ve made a cottage industry out of their offseason hobby through celebrity tee-offs. Golf is a safe, slow exercise for skaters who might otherwise be drinking and carousing, and NHL legends like Grant Fuhr have been said to have secretly obsessed over golf more than ice hockey. Yet the game of golf is also a looming threat and a potential punch-line in spring when the Stanley Cup playoffs arrive. Lose too many games off the bat, and POOF…you’re on the 1st tee. The PGA Tour and NHL betting communities also overlap. A lot. That’s why it’s strange to see sober Las Vegas odds on the upcoming PGA Championship listed at FanDuel (there’s a lack of strongly-handicapped power hitters, but that’s a common bookmaker’s mistake) and yet at the same sportsbook, Stanley Cup odds that appear to wildly overvalue or underestimate the 8 teams left. Colorado has a favorable 2nd-round draw against a slightly-more-fatigued St. Louis Blues club, for instance, causing everybody to pick the Avs all over again. But the Avalanche probably couldn’t play 3-4 straight series against the Blues and win each single time, as the buzz would suggest.

As for the “battle of Florida,” it’s perhaps admirable that folks are so enthusiastic about a changing-of-the-guard before it happens,  but that’s no reason for pundits to so wanly overlook Tampa Bay Lightning’s chances to mount at least a 3-round title defense, and threaten to seal a dynasty with another trip to the Stanley Cup Finals.

Where is the “Xander Schauffele” who’ll sneak up ahead of your sports bar’s consensus and lift the grail?

Eastern Conference Semifinals: Florida Panthers vs Tampa Bay Lightning

So many NHL bloggers perceived Tampa Bay as a playoff underdog early in 2022’s Stanley Cup tournament. But the league’s defending champs are coming off a grueling 7-game battle with Toronto, while the Florida Panthers made relatively short work of the star-studded Washington Capitals in the Eastern Conference quarterfinals, helping to mark the “Cats” as a series-price favorite headed into Game 1 on Tuesday. The Florida Panthers are in uncharted waters despite facing an in-state rival in round 2. However, any “experience” angle pursued by Tampa Bay bettors must be tempered with fair scouting of the opening round, in which the Panthers responded like a club with all kinds of Stanley Cup experience on-hand as Alex Ovechkin and the Capitals poured it on trying to force Game 7. Florida GK Sergei Bobrovsky stopped 34 shots as the Cats won 4-3 in OT.

Western Conference Semifinals: Colorado Avalanche vs St. Louis Blues

St. Louis, a 2-to-1 underdog to win Game 1 on the road, might have had a fresh-legs advantage in almost any other playoff scenario after whipping the Minnesota Wild in 6 games in the Western Conference quarterfinals. But the Blue Note is unlucky to have drawn Colorado, the team with more rest and training hours-logged than any NHL team over the past week. What’s more, the Avs are acknowledged to have as strong of an attack as any in the game.

The St. Louis Blues, however, are chronically underrated by the NHL’s coastal crew for a variety of reasons. The team’s old-fashioned checking can work wonders against an offense coming off a long layoff, and the Avalanche must worry themselves about checking a rejuvenated Ruslan Tarasenko and other St. Louis snipers. We expect that Game 1 will be a tighter affair than predicted by just about everybody, though we’ll see if STL can last 7.

Eastern Conference Semifinals: Carolina Hurricanes vs New York Rangers

Fans have charged the NHL’s referees with “stacking” the Toronto-Tampa Bay series to produce a 2nd-round “battle of Florida,” but there is no bigger officiating controversy in the league’s current headlines than the story of the New York Rangers’ debated Game 7 victory over Sidney Crosby and Pittsburgh. Marcus Pettersson lost his helmet on a rough encounter with Rangers winger Alexis Lafrenière behind the Pittsburgh net, and immediately headed for the bench as per the NHL rulebook, while protesting that he had been illegally interfered with and that the helmet-loss should have caused a whistle. As fate would have it, the play was controversially not whistled dead, and sniper Artemi Panarin scored a decisive goal on the “artificial” 5-on-4 power play for New York.

Sid the Kid’s post-game remarks, while implicating the NHL for its gaping loophole in the rulebook, also tacitly implied that Pittsburgh had been out-netminded in the opening round. Carolina’s goaltending is plenty solid, but the Rangers have a nice host of up-and-coming stars who are still undervalued by those pesky sportsbooks.

Western Conference Semifinals: Calgary Flames vs Edmonton Oilers

What odds WagerBop has found on Canada’s 2nd-round survivors! Unless the great Connor McDavid has caught a case of COVID-19, the current (+160) betting line on Edmonton to win another in-state” battle is among the best deals of the 2022 Stanley Cup playoffs. Calgary was impressive against Dallas, but the Stars played a fatigued and desperate Game 7 without anything close to the firepower the Oilers bring to the table.