Betting on the Colorado Avalanche this season feels like it should be a profitable proposition. The team has 31 wins in 41 games and 7 of their losses came in overtime. They lead the league in scoring and in goals-against, with better than double the goal differential (+72) of the next-best team in that category, theTampa Bay Lightning (+32).
But that’s the issue. The Avalanche is too good, and everyone knows it. Unless they are on the road against an elite opponent, the money line offers little more than a dribble of value.
Colorado is sitting at a staggering -1800 to win the Presidents’ Trophy, odds that are almost certain to shorten as the season grinds on. The Stanley Cup price isn’t much better at +280 — not exactly a mouthwatering return given the chaos of the NHL playoffs. Just ask the 2022-23 Boston Bruins how much regular-season dominance is worth once the puck drops in April.
As for the simplest of futures, forget it. There isn’t a yes/no market on the Avalanche even making the playoffs — they’re one of the few teams DraftKings isn’t posting odds for at all.
Individually, it’s much the same story. Nathan MacKinnon is priced aggressively in both the Rocket Richard (-180) and Hart Trophy (-300) races, while Cale Makar (-400) is similarly entrenched as the Norris Trophy favorite. All three races include these Avs as short-priced, odds-on favorites. These are strong positions, but they’re also positions that leave bettors risking a lot for modest reward.
In short, Avalanche futures are stacked with minimal profits and moderate gains, even with four months of regular season and an entire playoff still to play.
And, look, half the fun of sports betting is rallying around your team. But if there’s no realistic path to making a couple of bucks along the way, you might be better off cheering from the couch and keeping your money in your pocket — even if you’re decked out in burgundy and blue.
So instead of swallowing these pitiful prices and hoping for inevitability to cash, what if there were better ways to cheer on the Avs, ways that actually offer upside? That’s where prop betting comes in.
If Avalanche futures are priced for inevitability, the best opportunities often live in the moments where randomness still rules: the first goal, the first point, the first connection between two stars.
Odds by DraftKings Sportsbook and subject to change.
First goal scorer
One of the props offered for each NHL game is the first goal scorer. This is a selection of players from both teams with odds on which player will be the first to tickle twine in the game. It doesn’t matter when they score, only that they do. Unless a game ends scoreless through regulation and overtime, this prop always be decided. Not all players from each team are available.
Invariably, these odds are lottery tickets. They are long, usually starting in the +750 range for the elite of the elite, like MacKinnon, who was +775 as the first goal scorer as puck drop approached on Sunday’s game with the Florida Panthers. Most top-tier players hover closer to 10-1.
It’s with good reason that the odds are long, as the first goal scorer is not a consistent skill, both teams are in the mix and picking the right player among 36 skaters in a game is, at its core, a long shot.
But some teams, the Avs included, score first more often. And some players score that goal more often than their teammates.
While they don’t lead the league in scoring the first goal, the Avalanche are tied for second with the Minnesota Wild, scoring the first goal in 27 of their 41 games so far this season. The Washington Capitals lead the way with 29 first goals.
The market also doesn’t meaningfully adjust for repeat early scorers, even when the sample grows large enough to suggest something more than noise. Martin Necas has scored the first goal six times this season in 41 games for the Avalanche, a rate the market continues to treat as pure randomness. As an example, he was 14-1 to score the first goal in Sunday’s game. That means a $1 bet would yield $14 profit. If you had bet $1 on Necas as the first goal scorer in every game this season, assuming the odds are at least as profitable as Sunday, you would have laid down $41, losing $35 on the 35 misses… but the six hits returned $84 (or more, depending on price) for a $49 profit.
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Martin Necas lights the lamp for Avalanche
Martin Necas nets goal for Avalanche
Of course, we don’t have a time machine and there was no indicator that suggested Necas would ascend to be a dominant early-game force this season. What’s worse, even if you noticed the trend after a month and tried to jump on the train, five of those six goals by Necas came in the first month of the campaign.
All of which is to say first-goal scorer props can look profitable in hindsight, but they’re brutal to chase in real time. The prices are long for a reason; the variance is extreme, and even when a trend appears, it often vanishes just as quickly. Beating them consistently requires either perfect timing or an iron stomach.
If the goal is to find Avalanche bets that still offer upside without leaning entirely on chaos, the better path is shifting away from who scores first and toward who scores together. That’s where same-game parlays start to matter.
Goal-assist same-game parlays
A natural approach to try to get some Avalanche props into the plus-odds market might be same-game parlays, which are taking props that stack in the same game, multiplying the final odds and payout. For example, you could have taken MacKinnon’s goal total at over 0.5, as well as both Necas’ and Makar’s assist total at over 0.5, and combined them into a single bet that offered close to +300 odds. Those bets individually offered minus-odds ranging from -115 to -135.
Of course, it’s not that simple. As part of a parlay, if a single leg misses, you lose it all. And these parlays are much more difficult to hit, for much lower odds than you might want. It’s all in the nuances of the parlay picks.
On DraftKings, you can select goals, assists or points as your target. The game is less restrictive than other sportsbooks when it comes to parlays, as some won’t let you dial back to points from players on the same team for a stack. On some other platforms you need to mix specific goals or assists with points to take players from the same side.
The odds will scale with the specific selection, with better payouts for goals than assists, and better payouts for assists than points, simply due to scarcity. There are fewer goals than assists, and everything is a point.
But let’s start at the most difficult end of the spectrum and work our way back. What if you wanted to select a specific goal scorer and the players who get assists. As in, you are parlaying the specific layout of a goal as described above with MacKinnon from Necas and Makar, but with the added opportunity that the results don’t have to occur specifically on the same goal, but still leveraging the correlation.
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Cale Makar nets goal for Avalanche
Cale Makar scores goal vs. Blues
It might seem natural that certain players, especially top-tier ones on a team like the Avalanche, score points at the same time a lot. But on an individual play, it’s a lot more rare than it might seem on the surface. That exact combination for the Avs has happened only five times this season, regardless of which player earned the primary or secondary assist. And that’s the fourth-most frequent combination in the league this season, too. The only combos to hit six times so far have been two from the Winnipeg Jets (Kyle Connor from Mark Scheifele and Josh Morrissey, as well as Connor from Scheifele and Gabriel Viladri) and one from the Montreal Canadiens (Juraj Slafkovsky from Nick Suzuki and Cole Caufield).
Five hits in 41 games isn’t unheard of, but it’s far from frequent enough to justify +300 odds, which imply it should happen about once every four games.
If we get less specific, the odds go down, but the results go up. And this is where we find a more ideal balance. Stacking three top players in a same-game parlay for them to score a point (goal or assist) — not a specific goal setup — will usually settle between +125 to +150, depending on the game and depending on the players. That’s an implied probability ranging somewhere between 40% to 45%.
And that’s where the MacKinnon, Makar and Necas combo has been beating the odds. The three players have each notched a point in the same game in 22 of 41 games this season (53.7%). That’s the most games of any threesome in the league and only a couple of combos from the Oilers can top that rate (and those triplets don’t have as many games dressed because of injuries).
The odds for such parlays will scale with fewer players as well, but note that the Avalanche have some deadly combinations that continue to score points at the same time. Among the six two-player combos with points in the same game this season at least 25 times, the Avs have three of them. MacKinnon and Necas for 27, MacKinnon and Makar for 27 and Necas and Makar for 26. (And Artturi Lehkonen is in the mix a little, too, with he and MacKinnon each notching a point 23 times).
An Avalanche of props
There are so many different ways to take a piece of a game. It’s frankly a surprise that we can’t place a bet on the possibility of MacKinnon stopping mid-game to assemble a model airplane at center ice (I’ll take the “no” side; he’s too much of a gamer). Here’s a selection of other available bets usually offered at the game level, and how the Avs have done this season in that category.
Highest scoring period: This is a prop on which period in a game has the most total goals by either team. Betting on a tie is an option, which is to suggest that multiple periods will have the same highest goal count. The odds offered tend to follow the global trend, which is that third period has the most goals (28.4% this season), followed by a tie outcome (26.9% actual), second period (25.8%) and then the first period (18.8%). The Avalanche flip that script, resulting in games with the most goals in the second period (31.7%), followed by a tie (24.4%) and the first period (24.4%), then the third period (19.5%). That’s a big mismatch and shows the Avalanche buck the trends by pushing the action early.
Goal in first five minutes: This is betting on whether there will be a goal from either team in the first five minutes of the game. It has happened 32.8% of the time this season so far, but, once again, the Avalanche are at the top of the pack. A goal has been scored in the first five minutes in 21 of their 41 games this season, which is a huge tilt away from the global trends.
Goal in first 10 minutes: Same story here. The league-wide trend this season is for a goal in the first 10 minutes 57.3% of the time. The Avalanche have scored it themselves in 18 games and been involved in a goal in the first 10 minutes in 29 of their 41 games (70.1%).
The bottom line is that if you’re looking to enjoy Avalanche hockey and maybe grab some extra value along the way, props are where the action lives. From first goals to same-game parlays to period bets, there’s plenty of opportunity to ride the Avs’ unique tendencies rather than just following the predictable odds.
And really, isn’t that more fun than watching a money line you already (probably) know will cash?
