NHL Hockey Betting: San Jose Sharks at Los Angeles Kings

The San Jose Sharks finally won a playoff game at home and now they head down to the Staples Center with an opportunity to eliminate the Los Angeles Kings. This is a scary prospect for the Kings due to the Sharks’ freaky home/away tendencies. The deal with hockey–and most sports–is teams play better on their home ice/court/field. At least in theory. Some teams play better than others, but almost always they’re better to some degree at home than on the road. This isn’t exactly ‘rocket science’. Some teams take this to extremes–the Los Angeles Kings in recent years a case in point. The recent vintage Kings were almost unbeatable at home but very ordinary on the road.

For some reason, this doesn’t apply to the San Jose Sharks. Like the Kings, they’ve taken this concept to ‘extremes’ but in a downright bizarre way. San Jose had the best road record in the league this season, a game better than the Presidents’ Trophy winning Washington Capitals. The Sharks were 28-10-3 away from home. But here’s the punchline–they were terrible at home. As in ‘expansion team’ terrible. Edmonton had a better home record. Only three teams in the league had fewer home wins. The Sharks were 18-20-3 at home. The ‘party line’ is that the team got off to a poor start at home this year but has been playing better since the first of the year. That’s true to some extent.

The more important point here, however, isn’t that the Sharks have been terrible at home. The point we’re making is that the Sharks have been excellent on the road. They’ll have plenty of confidence heading into Los Angeles and based on their performance down the stretch the Sharks are the better team right now. San Jose went 14-4 against teams with winning records in the second half of the season. In road games with a total of 5 or less they were 20-5 this year meaning they thrive in low scoring, defensive oriented contests in the opposing team’s arena. The Kings just haven’t looked right of late and in any case we’ll take the value price with the road team.

BET SAN JOSE SHARKS +115 OVER LOS ANGELES KINGS