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

Anaheim +165 over Vegas 

10:00 PM EST. OT included. Vegas looked damn good on opening night. It was a convincing victory, the Golden Knights reminded everyone why they're one of the league's elite teams, and now the market gets its first opportunity to react. That's exactly where our interest begins. Make no mistake, we're not taking anything away from Vegas. They're good. Very good. But after an impressive opening-night performance, you're not exactly sneaking up to the betting window to buy them at a discount. You're paying retail—and probably a little more.

Anaheim sits at the opposite end of the perception spectrum. The Ducks have been irrelevant to most bettors for years, and reputations in this market don't disappear overnight. They started making some noise last season, but they're still a small-market West Coast team playing most of their games when a large percentage of East Coast bettors are either asleep or paying attention to something else. Ask the average casual hockey bettor about Vegas and he'll have an opinion. Ask him about Anaheim and you might get the starting lineup from 2017.

That's where the opportunity lies. Leo Carlsson, Cutter Gauthier and Beckett Sennecke give Anaheim a young offensive core with enormous upside, and this isn't the same Ducks team the market has been accustomed to pricing near the bottom of the league. There is legitimate talent here, but we're still getting prices associated with the old Anaheim Ducks. That gap between what a team has been and what it is becoming is precisely what we're looking for.

Eventually, if Anaheim continues progressing, the market will catch up. The +165s will become +145s, the +145s will become +125s, and everybody will suddenly discover how much young talent the Ducks have. We'd rather arrive before the crowd. Vegas deserves its respect, but after a convincing opening-night victory, that respect is already baked into an inflated price. Anaheim remains under the radar, and we're going to take advantage of these early numbers for as long as the market gives them to us.

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