There are only six games on Tuesday, but we still have plenty of opportunities to look for exploitable prop bets by leveraging our NHL Models and Trends tool as well as the Bet Labs database.
Here are three props I’m eyeing tonight, starting at 8:00 p.m.ET.
Maple Leafs C Nazem Kadri
The pick: Under 2.0 shots on goal (-150)
Head Coach Mike Babcock stated in the offseason that his goal was to get John Tavares, Auston Matthews, and Kadri all around 20 minutes of ice time a night.
We talked about how unrealistic that goal is on NHL Inside the Lab, and Kadri has been the center who has seen his time on ice suffer the most, logging just 13:43 minutes in the Maple Leafs’ last game.
That’s a significant decrease from his 16:56 time on ice over the past year, and he’s hardly a high-volume shooter, ranking in the 84th percentile of shots per game during the same time period.
It’s a reasonable under opportunity to consider today, taking on a Stars team that looks much improved defensively, allowing only one goal through two games this season.
Flames G Mike Smith
The pick: Under 29.5 saves (-115)
Calgary has allowed the second-fewest shots per game to start the year, averaging only 21.5 shots against over their first two games.
Our proprietary save prediction metric in Models has Smith for the second-fewest saves on the slate today (19.73), which makes sense given Calgary has allowed the sixth-most goals to start the season (4.5 per game) on very few shots.
Kings C Anze Kopitar
The pick: Over 2.5 shots on goal (-115)
Kopitar is one of the best two-way forwards in the league, but tonight could be a decent opportunity to focus on his offensive upside. Over the past year, he has averaged 2.43 shots per game so on the surface this line looks pretty efficient. But then you dig deeper.
Winnipeg appears to have taken a step back defensively, allowing 38.5 shots per game to start the year, third-most of any team in an admittedly small sample. I like Kopitar to surpass his long-term averages tonight in a strong matchup, and he’s averaged 3.0 shots on goal this year.
Kopitar carries the third-highest our shot prediction on the slate (3.65) behind only Tyler Seguin (4.13) and Nathan MacKinnon (4.50).
