NHL Betting Odds: St. Louis Blues at Vancouver Canucks

Added on Feb 24, 2011 by Jack Thurman in

NHL

Sportsbooks will be offering plenty of NHL betting opportunities on Thursday night and in this post we’ll take a look at a Western Conference matchup between the St. Louis Blues and Vancouver Canucks. Canucks currently lead the Western Conference with the best record in the NHL. St. Louis is playing reasonably well at the moment though they’re still 7 points out of the 8th and final playoff spot.

St. Louis Blues at Vancouver Canucks
February 24, 2011 7:05 PM Pacific

While at first glance this a ‘no brainer’ play on the home town Canucks, the reality may not quite be so simple. First of all, the Canucks are in a position where they need to balance maintaining their momentum with the ‘big picture’ goal of a deep playoff run. In the Northwest Division, the Canucks are running away with the lead–currently they have a 15 point advantage over second place Calgary and Minnesota. Detroit is just 5 points behind Vancouver in the conference race, but with the Canucks 9 points ahead of Pacific Division leading San Jose 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 San Jose (76 points) from 12th place Columbus (66 points). The Blues are in #13th place right now, but that’s just 7 points out of the 8th and final playoff spot at which point everything is *very* tightly packed all the way up to third. The Blues could put themselves back into the playoff picture with just two or three wins and a longer winning streak puts them in a position to improve their seeding.

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. Luongo played in Vancouver’s last game–a 3-2 home loss to Montreal–and this would be a good spot to give him a night off.

Simply put, the Blues need 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 Blues with several tough home games against Boston, Columbus and Nashville on deck. The Blues have played Vancouver very tough in the past few years particularly on the Canucks’ home ice–St. Louis has won 3 of the last 7 meetings here (good for a +1.7 unit profit) and have taken 2 of 3 from the Canucks this year including a December win here. Given the scheduling spot and the price, we’ll take a shot on the road team.

Bet St. Louis Blues +185 over Vancouver Canucks