NHL Online Betting – Bruins, Sharks And Devils Are All Good Plays
The ins and outs of an NHL season’s rhythms need to be taken into consideration when making sets of predictions for selected weekend games.
1) Saturday: Pittsburgh @ Boston: Bruins Should Ride Fresh Legs To Victory
The sports betting landscape remains the same even though the sport changes. The principles of online betting in the NHL might be different from March Madness betting, but they’re very similar to the patterns one must observe when predicting the NBA or Major League Baseball. Travel is a grueling part of the professional athlete’s daily life. Travel is an opponent – sometimes as much as the other team. It’s hard to play games on back-to-back days, especially on the road and even more especially when the other team has had a day to rest. Therefore, when the Pittsburgh Penguins go to TD Garden to face the Boston Bruins in Massachusetts this Saturday, the odds will be stacked against them. Pittsburgh has to face one of the teams that has lit up the NHL, the New Jersey Devils, on Friday night in Newark. Then the Pens must go to Boston the very next night to play another game. The Bruins are almost as hot as the Devils are. Boston has claimed six straight games (the only difference is that New Jersey has won nine of its last 10 while Boston is “merely” 7-3 in its last 10 contests), so Pittsburgh should find it hard to prevail on the road. Take Boston for two basic reasons: The Bruins are playing excellent hockey right now, and they’re going to be a lot fresher than Pittsburgh on Saturday.
2) Saturday: Dallas @ San Jose: Stars-Sharks Is A West Coast Version of Pens-Bruins
Everything that you read in the above paragraph on Penguins-Bruins applies here to this confrontation between Dallas and San Jose late Saturday night at HP Pavilion in San Jose. The Stars play a Friday night game at Anaheim and then have to catch a quick red-eye flight up the California coast to Silicon Valley, where they must play a game against a flourishing opponent. Again, it’s hard enough to play back-to-back games on the road, but it’s even more difficult to play that second game of the back-to-back stack when it comes against a thriving foe. San Jose, at the time this article was written, has won seven straight games to zoom into third place in the Western Conference behind Vancouver and Detroit. The Sharks are displaying the form that won them the President’s Trophy (as the best team in the NHL regular season) in the 2009 season and gave them the Western Confernce’s best record in the 2010 campaign. It’s going to be awfully difficult for Dallas to escape from California with a late-night victory.
3) Sunday: New Jersey @ New York Islanders: The Devils Should Get Their Due
The point is plain: Over the past four weeks, no team has been better than the New Jersey Devils. Entering March 2, coach Jacques Lemaire had guided his team to a 17-2-2 record in its past 21 games. The Devils might be just a few points ahead of the Islanders in the Eastern Conference standings, but that’s because the Devils were so thoroughly abysmal through the first 40 games of the season. New Jersey is a different team right now, and that fact alone should give the Devils a pronounced advantage in this Sunday afternoon face-off at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island.
NHL Betting Picks: Boston and San Jose (Saturday); New Jersey (Sunday).
