Capitals, Thrashers aim to extend respective winning streaks

Hockey Betting Lines

03/16/2009 - (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - Facing the possibility of playing again without star winger Ilya Kovalchuk, the Thrashers might want to ask the Capitals if they can borrow from their surplus of talented Russian skaters.

Washington's duo of Alex Ovechkin and Alexander Semin will attempt to deny Atlanta a franchise-record sixth straight win tonight in a Southeast Division battle at Philips Arena.

While Kovalchuk could miss a second straight game because of an upper-body injury, the Capitals aren't short on overseas talent. Both Semin and Ovechkin scored in the shootout of Saturday's 5-4 victory over Carolina and combined for six points in regulation.

Semin notched a goal and three assists to give him 16 points (7 goals, 9 assists) over a nine-game point streak. Ovechkin, meanwhile, ended with an assist in addition to netting his league-leading 49th goal. He is just one tally shy of becoming the first Washington skater to ever post three 50-goal seasons and has 23 goals and 45 points in 27 career games against Atlanta.

Ovechkin has scored more goals in his career against the Thrashers than any other club and has seven goals and seven assists over the last 10 games he has played in overall.

Mike Green also had a goal and an assist, as he leads all defenseman with 24 markers and 60 points. Jose Theodore halted 28 saves in helping Washington to its third straight win and halt a four-game home losing streak.

The Capitals did play a second straight game on Saturday without both Donald Brashear (knee) and Sergei Fedorov (illness) and both are questionable for tonight.

Having ended its home skid, the Capitals bring a five-game road winning streak into tonight's battle, its first such run since 2000-01, and begin a five-game road trip. The club is one victory shy of the franchise-record six-game road winning streak set in 1983-84.

The Southeast Division-leading Caps are 17-12-4 as the guest this season and are one point back of New Jersey for the second seed in the East.

The Thrashers were able to extend their win streak to five games on Saturday without Kovalchuk. Todd White tied the game with 3.5 seconds left in regulation to extend his point streak to five games (2 goals, 3 assists) and Brett Sterling notched the lone goal of the shootout in a 4-3 victory against Buffalo.

Kovalchuk, who leads the team with 36 goals and has 21 tallies and 49 points in 40 games versus Washington, will be re-evaluated today and is questionable.

Slava Kozlov and Marty Reasoner scored for the Thrashers, who also won five in a row from November 2-14 and have never before won six consecutive games in club history.

Kari Lehtonen halted 34 shots in the win for Atlanta, which is 13-18-2 at home after having won four of its last five as the host.

The Capitals have won four of their last five versus the Thrashers but have lost three of their last four trips to Atlanta.

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Sportsbook Betting Lines

Who Makes the Sportsbook Betting Lines?

Las Vegas Sports Consultants (LVSC) is the world’s premier oddsmaking company and the most respected authority on making the lines. Mike Seba is a Senior Oddsmaker at LVSC and has been making lines for the last six years. In our extended interview, Seba explained that there are 4-5 oddsmakers assigned to make lines for each of the major sports (pro & college football and basketball; MLB, NHL, boxing, golf). Each of these oddsmakers bring unique opinions, strengths and weaknesses to the process. Oddsmakers at LVSC are professional sports junkies who love what they do and would probably do it for nothing if you asked them, but they do get paid for it. By necessity their approach is very research-oriented and concise, since with millions of dollars at risk there is little margin for error.

“You either have a passion for it or you don’t,” Seba said.

“The #1 thing for us is to make a line for each game that creates good two-way action. We do this by drawing from past experiences and applying them to current situations. People think it’s much more complicated, but it’s not. “

What are the Football Betting Lines Trying to Accomplish?

There is a common misconception that point spreads represent the oddsmakers’ prediction of how many points the favorite will win by. That is not the case at all – their intent is NOT to evenly split the ATS result between the teams; rather, their goal is to attract equal betting action on both sides. Stated another way, they want to create a line that half the people find appealing to bet one way while the other half find it appealing to bet the other way (known as ‘dividing the action’).

Divided action means the sportsbook is guaranteed a profit on the game because of the fee charged to the bettor (called juice or vig – typically $11 bet to win $10).

How the Opening Line Is Made

The opening line is the first line created by the oddsmakers, which is then sent out to sportsbooks. Of course there is an entire method to the madness on how the opening line is created. Seba explained that it all starts with each oddsmaker creating a line on each game based upon their own personal approach. This usually includes having up-to-date power ratings on each team.

Power ratings are the oddsmaker’s value of each team and are used as a guide to calculate a "preliminary" pointspread on an upcoming game. The power ratings are adjusted after each game a team plays. Examples of non-game factors that would require an adjustment to a team's power rating are key player injuries and player trades.

Once a game’s power rating based pointspread is determined, the oddsmaker will make adjustments to that line after considering each team's most recent games played and previous games played against that opponent. Also, adjustments are made after reading each team’s local newspapers to get a sense of what the coaches & players are thinking going into the game.

Since the oddsmaker’s ultimate goal is equally dividing the sports betting action, public perception and sportsbook betting patterns must be taken into account. For example, the public might have heavy betting interest week after week on a popular college football betting team such as USC. If an oddsmaker comes up with a preliminary line of USC -7, then an adjustment up to -7.5 or -8 would be made in response to the public’s expected USC bias.

The last step in the line-making process for each oddsmaker is taking one final look to determine whether or not the line "feels right." This is where common sense and past experience with how games are bet enters into the picture.

A round-table discussion among the 4-5 oddsmakers involved in making the line for each sport is then conducted and a consensus line is decided upon by the Odds Director before it is released to the sportsbooks. Of the 4-5 oddsmakers, generally the 2 most respected opinions are weighed more heavily by the Odds Director before he decides on the final line.

Why Sports Betting Lines Change

Once the opening line is released by LVSC, the individual sportsbooks decide if they want to make any adjustments before offering it to the public. Reasons for such adjustments include:

Experts working for the individual books having a strong opinion on the game

Individual books having players who consistently bet with certain tendencies (such as an extreme bias toward favorites or toward a certain popular team like USC)

The purpose of these adjustments, like all line adjustments, is to more equally divide the betting action.

Once betting begins, sportsbooks can adjust the line at any time. In doing so they attempt to make more attractive the team that is getting less action. By moving the line, sportsbooks can influence how the public bets on a particular game.

For example, if the pointspread on a game is 7 and most of the money is coming in on the underdog (taking the +7), sportsbooks will then move the number down to 6 ½ to try and attract money on the favorite.

Moving the line is the oddsmaker's effort to balance betting action, and often times such moves can have a major impact on a bettor’s decision. Oddsmakers can also change the line depending on various event-related factors such as player injuries or weather. Obviously, if the line comes out a week ahead of the event (which is the case in football), there is much that could happen during the week leading up to the event that could affect the line. Oddsmakers have to determine if any changes are necessary and send out an "adjusted line."

“The main objective is that our clients get equal action on both sides,” Seba said. “We’re not trying to pick the team that covers the spread, we’re trying to make it a coin flip, a tough decision (for the bettor). If we’ve done that, we’ve done our job.”

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