Editor’s Note: For about two and a half years now, Joe has been publishing picks here and back at All Things NIT, our former site. There have been moments of elation (the Nationals winning the 2019 World Series, the first two months of the 2019-20 college basketball season). There have been moments of frustration (the Dodgers’ 2020 NLCS comeback, the second two months of the 2019-20 college basketball season). Overall, the results have been positive, with an average return on investment, per pick, of 0.9% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 1,462 published picks, not including pending futures. And while 0.9% might not sound enormous, you can do a lot with it over time.
Use these picks at your own risk. Only you are responsible for any money you lose, and you should not bet more than you can afford to lose. If you have a gambling problem, get help.
Lines for these come from the Vegas consensus or the closest approximation available at the time picks are written, unless otherwise noted. FanGraphs is heavily used in making MLB picks.
Just a future today, and as usual with those, the line comes from Bovada due to the lack of a current/accurate Vegas consensus.
Stanley Cup
We published our NHL model today, and it likes the Canadiens (relatively speaking). As I say in that second link, I don’t trust our model over the market. I do, however, trust the market against itself.
Two things our model should be fairly good at are reflecting how teams’ expectations can change over time and reflecting the impact of home-ice advantage. The disparity between the Canadiens’ odds tonight and the Canadiens’ series odds is fairly small in our model, but it’s fairly large in the market, implying the market believes Montreal’s home-ice advantage will be smaller than that of a normal team, presumably because the crowd size will be smaller thanks to more significant Covid restrictions there than in Florida.
This should be accurate. But how accurate should it be? There will be some crowd in Montreal, and home-ice advantage isn’t limited to the noise of the crowd. Either those few thousand fans are a massive difference-maker or the market’s contradicting itself here. For a small price, we’ll take a chance on the latter.
Pick: Montreal to win +200. Low confidence.
