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The Bodog Bark: North American Sports Betting News & Views
NHL Hockey Betting: The Trade Deadline
It's the most important day of the NHL regular season. Teams have until 3:00 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday to make trades, and make trades they will. Dozens of them. The best teams in the League are trying to get better; the worst are trying to cut costs and acquire some prospects for the future. And if you're one of the many teams in between? It could be years before you escape the middle class and drink from the Stanley Cup.
It used to be worse. Before the latest collective bargaining agreement was signed after the 2005-05 lockout, the trade deadline was 26 days before the end of the regular season. The League's richest teams though nothing of “renting” a player for less than a month. Now the deadline is 40 days before the end of the season, making it a little riskier and more expensive for teams to pull the trigger.
But they do anyway. A typical scenario revolves around a skilled player with a pricey contract that's about to expire, playing for a team with little or no hope of doing well in the postseason. Such a team has very little leverage in this situation and is happy just to get out from under the contract. An elite team with lots of money to throw around will swoop in, offer a package of prospects and/or draft picks, and end up with another quality player to add to the roster. This is one reason why it's so rare for an outsider to buck the NHL odds and win the Cup.
The better the player being traded, the more a team will get in return. Perhaps the most famous deadline deal took place in 1996, when the St. Louis Blues shipped three young players and two draft picks to the Los Angeles Kings for Wayne Gretzky. It didn't quite work out the way St. Louis had hoped. Gretzky scored 37 points in 31 games, but the Blues didn't even make it out of the second round, and The Great One signed with the New York Rangers that summer.
Even in that trade, none of the five players acquired by Los Angeles amounted to much in the NHL. The Atlanta Thrashers are hoping for better results after sending Ilya Kovalchuk to the New Jersey Devils a month ago in a package that landed defenseman Johnny Oduya, a late bloomer who built up a cult following in the Swamp with his offensive skills. Atlanta got a little more in return by trading Kovalchuk early, but once you get nearer the deadline, you're more likely to get something like the “future considerations” the Anaheim Ducks settled for on Tuesday when they sent former All-Star defenseman Nick Boynton to the Chicago Blackhawks.
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Updated: 3 March 2010
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MLB Betting: Spring Training
It may still be winter across most of the United States and Canada, but it's already spring in Florida and Arizona. You can tell by the unmistakable sound of the crack of the bat. Exhibition baseball begins Tuesday afternoon with three games – only one with MLB odds attached, since the other two involve major league versus college teams. But the fact that we're now betting on preseason baseball speaks volumes about the explosion of online gambling in the age of Web 2.0.
Handicappers have been waiting for this moment for nearly four months. You're not going to find a simpler sport on which to gamble; baseball is a set of discrete events, very mechanical in nature and relatively easy to analyze using statistics. Followers of this sport are obsessed with numbers. Good thing for us the betting public is invariably obsessed with the wrong numbers, like how many wins or saves a pitcher has, or batting average. Sabermetricians have shown many a sharp handicapper the way to the bank, and no, it doesn't start in your mother's basement. The more baseball “purists" rail against newfangled stats like xFIP and wOBA, the more money we make at their expense.
We can use some of the newer metrics to take advantage of the MLB futures odds, as well. The New York Yankees are the defending World Series champions, and they're favored at 11-4 to defend their championship. The team that the Yankees beat, the Philadelphia Phillies, is next at 6-1, tied with the Boston Red Sox. New York had by far the best record of any of these three teams last year at 103-59, but as any sabermetrician will tell you, past wins are not a very good indicator of future success. Run differential is better, and the team with the biggest run differential last year was the Los Angeles Dodgers at +169 (seven more runs than New York). They're available at the bargain price of 14-1.
Let's take a trip down memory lane and look at some of the most important deadline deals of the past 30 years.
March 10, 1980: The New York Islanders acquire Butch Goring from the Los Angeles Kings for Billy Harris and Dave Lewis. Goring scores 19 points in 21 playoff games and the Islanders win their first of four consecutive Stanley Cups.
March 8, 1988: The Boston Bruins send Geoff Courtnall, Bill Ranford and future considerations to the Edmonton Oilers for Andy Moog. The Oilers take the Cup that year, and again in 1990 (both times over Moog and the Bruins) with Ranford winning the Conn Smythe Trophy.
March 4, 1991: The Hartford Whalers trade Ron Francis, Grant Jennings and Ulf Samuelsson to the Pittsburgh Penguins for John Cullen, Jeff Parker and Zarley Zalapski. Pittsburgh wins the next two Stanley Cups.
March 6, 2000: The Colorado Avalanche obtain Ray Bourque and Dave Andreychuk from the Bruins for Brian Rolston, Samuel Pahlsson, Martin Grenier and a 2000 first-round draft pick. Bourque wins his only Cup the next year (after another deadline deal lands defenseman Rob Blake) and promptly retires.
March 9, 2006: The Carolina Hurricanes pick up Mark Recchi from the Penguins in exchange for Niklas Nordgren, Krystofer Kolanos and a second-round pick in 2007. Recchi scores seven goals in the playoffs and the Hurricanes win their first and only Cup in franchise history.
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You can use run differential as a quick and dirty way of evaluating a team's actual level of play versus its perceived level of play, which is what value handicapping is all about. But spring training is also a time for evaluating all those offseason roster changes. None of the 30 teams in the majors is going to have exactly the same season as last year. Even if they all stuck with the same rosters, players get either better or worse with age.
No team has made a bigger splash during the offseason than the Seattle Mariners. They had a relatively successful 85-77 season last year, their first under new general manager Jack Zduriencik. That's 24 more victories than the Mariners had in 2008; as a result, the M's racked up 11.91 units of profit in 2009. They put up those numbers despite a negative run differential of -52, which would normally be a red flag for Seattle's chances this season, but this isn't the same team:
In: Cliff Lee, Chone Figgins, Milton Bradley, Eric Byrnes, Casey Kotchman, Brandon League
Out: Adrian Beltre, Kenji Johjima, Russell Branyan, Brandon Morrow, Carlos Silva
The Mariners also signed ace Felix Hernandez to a five-year contract extension worth a reported $78 million. Starting pitching is the No. 1 concern of GMs and handicappers alike, and the addition of Lee gives the M's two of the very best pitchers in the game today. But is it enough to make Seattle a World Series bargain at 16-1? The blogheads at Lookout Landing projected the new-look Mariners to win 88.5 games, a half-game more than the defending AL West-champion Los Angeles Angels at 15-1. But then the M's signed Erik Bedard to a one-year deal. Bedard was worth 1.9 WAR (Wins Above Replacement) last year according to FanGraphs, even while making only 15 starts because of injury, so he could be the difference in Seattle winning the division.
The Phillies, meanwhile, no longer have Lee (6.0 projected WAR for 2010) at the top of the rotation. But they do have Roy Halladay (6.4 projected WAR), who came over from the Toronto Blue Jays as part of that blockbuster four-team deal. By the way, Halladay then signed a three-year $60-million contract extension with Philadelphia. The sound of hearts breaking in Toronto is almost as loud as the crack of the bat.
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