A PERFECT night last night as we went 3-0 with our picks and picked up a nice 6.68 units. There are only two games in the NHL tonight, and we have one pick going which should be a winner:
St Louis Blues @ Winnipeg Jets : Blues 1.82 BetOnline
The Blues (5-1-0) are coming off of a shootout win last night against Chicago (3-2) and the Jets (3-4-0) will play their first game since Tuesday where they faced the Montreal Canadiens at home. The Winnipeg Jets lost that game 3-0; they couldn’t manage to score a goal even though they out-shot the Canadiens 36-25. They also gave the Habs 5 powerplay opportunities and they capitalized on 1. The Jets had 3 powerplays of their own but couldn’t do anything with them. The St.Louis Blues will give goaltender Jaroslav Halak a break tonight and they will go with Brian Elliott in goal (confirmed). Brian Elliott made an appearance in the 6-2 Blues loss against San Jose on Tuesday. In 20 minutes on the ice, Elliot allowed 2 goals on 13 shots (.846 SV%). He currently sits with a 6.00 GAA because of this. This may look bad on the surface, but analyze it for a minute. He had just 20 minutes of play against a Sharks team that was obviously on fire that night. If you look back at the statistics for that game, Blues starter Jaroslav Halak had the exact same save percentage as Elliot, as he allowed 4 goals on 26 shots for a .846 SV%. It was an off night for the Blues and we can’t blame the game on either goaltender. You win as a team and you lose as a team. The Blues deciding to start Elliot tonight (with his “6.00 GAA”) is undoubtedly the reason why we don’t have more juice on St.Louis tonight. The Blues are doing good offensively, they currently average 3.83 Goals/Game. As a team they are allowing 2.50 GA/G (but keep in mind the 6 goals by the Sharks is included in there). One statistic that is undesirable about the Blues is their penalty minutes. The Blues average 25.3 penalty minutes/game which is far too high. Again though, this looks bad on the surface, but two games in particular are what drove this number up so high (53 PIM against Florida, 47 against San Jose). Luckily for us, they face a Jets Powerplay that is only successful 16.7% of the time. The Jets Penalty Kill is managing to stop 80% of their opponents powerplays, but the Blues have a higher than average powerplay success rate @ 30.4%. Unless something drastic happens with the St.Louis Blues tonight, they should have no problem handling the Winnipeg Jets in front of a Jets home crowd.
