NHL Betting Odds: Dallas Stars at Vancouver Canucks

Added on Feb 19, 2011 by Jack Thurman in

NHL

Saturday will be a busy day for sports betting enthusiasts with a very attractive NHL card in addition to an absurd number of college basketball games. In this post we’ll head way out West as the Vancouver Canucks host the Dallas Stars in a Western Conference matchup. Vancouver boasts the best record in the NHL, while Dallas is among the teams in the rest of the pack out West that will be battling down to the wire for playoff qualification.

Dallas Stars at Vancouver Canucks
February 19, 2011 7:00 PM Pacific

Although the sight of big moneyline underdogs on any NHL odds rundown can be attractive it’s important to find good matchups and situations in which to take a position on one. This could be a made to order situation for both a strong showing by the visiting Stars and a letdown performance by the home team. You can get an idea of why this is the case simply by looking at the dynamics in each team’s respective division. In the Northwest Division, the Canucks are running away with the lead–currently they have a 15 point advantage over second place Calgary. Detroit is just 5 points behind Vancouver in the conference race, but with the Canucks 12 points ahead of Pacific Division leading Phoenix (more about that in a moment) it would take a monumental collapse for them to fall out of the top two playoff seeds in the West.

Once you get past the top two teams, however, its all up for grabs in the Western Conference and this isn’t just metaphor–a total of 10 points separate third place Phoenix (71 points) from 13th place St. Louis (61 points). The Pacific Division–where Dallas plays–is the craziest of all with a total of 3 points separating division leading Phoenix from last place Anaheim. If the season ended today, every team in the Pacific would qualify for the postseason while only one (Vancouver) from the Northwest would make the cut.

But back to this game–with the NHL regular season entering its stretch run at some point Vancouver could have very good reason to take its foot off the gas a bit. Keep the team healthy and fresh while every other team in the Western Conference is in a tooth and nail fight for their playoff survival. This would allow the Canucks–in theory at least–to be rested and ready when the postseason begins where they’d be facing early round opponents that had to scrap all the way to the end of the schedule just to qualify for the playoffs. Hockey is a tough game for a team to ‘flip the switch’ and regain their highest competitive level, but if you’re Canucks’ coach Alain Vigneault you may want to take steps to do this pre-emptively rather than have the players suffer an inevitable loss of intensity with little immediate competitive pressure. At the very least Vancouver might want to give starting goalie Roberto Luongo a few extra nights off. Backup Cory Schneider has started the last two times the Canucks have faced the Stars and may get the nod here as well. Schneider has played well this year, but he’s clearly a cut below Luongo who is one of the best in the business.

Simply put, Dallas needs this game–and every other point they can scrap–much more than Vancouver does. Yet it would be very easy for the Canucks to look past the Stars at the beginning of a long home stand and particularly with Dallas’ leading scorer Brad Richards out with a concussion. Stars have lost 8 of their last 10, and Vancouver has dominated head to head play against the Stars winning 8 of the last 11 since 2008 and 4 of 5 at home. Canucks are returning home from a three game road trip and interestingly enough 3 of their 4 regulation losses at Rogers Arena this year have come in the first game back after a road trip of 3 or more games. The fact that Vancouver has handled Dallas with such ease could be to their disadvantage here–we’ll take the Stars at a big price.

Bet Dallas Stars +170 over Vancouver Canucks