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Posted at 10:00 AM EST. Odds are subject to change.

Calgary +350 over Colorado

10:00 PM EST. This one starts and ends with the number, so let's start there. Calgary visits

Colorado tonight, and the market has the Avalanche at -400 to -410 — an 80 percent win probability stapled onto a team that is 7-5-1 and has gone just 6-5 this season in games where it was favoured on the moneyline. Read that again. Colorado has lost nearly half its games as a favourite, hasn't won two in a row since its first two games of the season, and is 2-3 in its last five — and the books are pricing it like the '02 Red Wings. . At this inflated price, Calgary only has to win this game about 22 percent of the time — once in every four and a half tries — for the bet to pay for itself.

And this is not some corpse of a hockey team being wheeled into Denver. The Flames have won five of their last six, they're playing their best hockey of the season, they've scored four or more in three of their last four, and their power play is humming at 29 percent. Matt Coronato has 13 points and just hung a four-point night on somebody; Joel Farabee has scored in four of his last five. Colorado's starter, Mackenzie Blackwood, is 6-3-0 but with an .894 save percentage — the wins are the offense's, because pucks are going in on him at a backup's rate. Add the quiet trend that Calgary has lost by more than two goals in only one of its last five visits to Ball Arena, and you get a live dog that hangs around, against a favourite whose goalie leaks. 

Calgary played last night in Edmonton and got blanked 4-0, so this is the second night of a back-to-back, at altitude, with Jonathan Huberdeau still on injured reserve and the starting goalie unconfirmed, a backup start is likely. This is a market over reaction. The Avalanche are 5-1-1 at home, second in the league at 4.15 goals a game, Nathan MacKinnon has 22 points and has scored in eight of his last nine home games against Calgary, and Colorado has won nine of the last ten meetings. Nobody's pretending the Flames are the better team. They don't have to be. They have to win one game, on a night when a streaky favourite with a sub-.900 goalie gives them a man-advantage unit that's converting at 29 percent, and the price pays like it happens half as often as it plausibly does. That's the whole bet, and it's a good one.

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