I have been very vocal about my thoughts on Bovada in the past, but I won’t get into that today. We need to focus on the massive troll-job that they pulled on the poor tortured people of Buffalo.
One of the few things that I commend Bovada (and Bodog) for are putting their NHL season point totals up fairly early (and in the case of American bettors, putting them up at all). Due to the fact that they are one of the few betting sites which actively e-mail their odds to every beat writer in the world, whom which blindly tweet it out without any regards for anything, sent Buffalo’s corner of Twitter into a frenzy when the seemingly-improved Sabres were set to have a 5.5 point improvement on last year’s last-place effort of 54.
The additions of a now-healthy Evander Kane, as well as free-agent Cody Hodgson, goaltender Robin Lehner, as well as the not-first overall draft pick of Connor McDavid made most fans believe the team was in for a larger improvement. We will get to whether or not this is a warranted reaction in a moment, but the best part of all this is that the tortured fanbase were in for a surprise when they went to sign-up to place their bets:
Bovada are one of the US betting sites that do not allow customers from New York or New Jersey. So any Sabres fans who have not escaped the, er… nice… city of Buffalo have yet another thing to be disappointed about.
But is this the worst case circumstances? All Sabres fans who followed any hockey beat reporter saw the odds, and were sent into a frenzy. But is this team better than the one we saw last year? I would say it would be hard to be worse, but I hardly find this line an insult. It is important to remember that the odds that are set are not direct representations of how many points a team is get in the season. While they may get a bit more scoring this year with Kane and O’Reilly (who will also improve poor Matt Moulson who has been rotting away), their defense still has a ton of questions. Cody Hodgson has holes in him, and he is going to be their most reliable option? Under the offense-first system that we will expect from new head coach Dan Bylsma, I think it is safe to assume they will be leaking goals are a similar rate.
Through some early projections, I believe the Sabres point total is right where it should be, leading to no significant edge betting on either side. Does the fact that Bovada knows it will not receive a large fraction of homer action on the line influence where they set it? I would imagine it does, but no more than one point.