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

Dallas -½ +150 over Washington 

7:00 PM EST. Regulation only. Look at Washington's record and you'd think everything is fine. Look at the way they actually play and you'd wonder how they've won as much as they have. That's the whole bet tonight. The Capitals are near the bottom of the league in five-on-five puck possession time in the offensive end, ranked 26th, which means most nights they are chasing the puck instead of owning it, and chasing the puck is not a way to keep winning hockey games. Wins built on goaltending and finishing while the other team has the puck eventually stop coming, and they tend to stop coming all at once.

Dallas is the other side of that coin. The Stars rank 11th in the league in that same five-on-five offensive-end possession time, a team that spends its nights with the puck and doing something with it, and that's the team you want when the price is a plus number. The goal in hockey is to possess the puck and create chances, and you can only do that in the offensive end, so a top-half possession team against a bottom-six possession team is not a coin flip, it's a mismatch the standings haven't caught up to yet. Washington has been getting away with it, Dallas hasn't needed to get away with anything.

And the market is giving you the plus price to prove it, but only if you take it the right way. Dallas -½ at +150 in regulation means the Stars have to win it in sixty minutes, no overtime safety net, because a tie after regulation is a loser on this ticket. That's fair, and it's the price of getting plus money on the better possession team. A team that owns the puck like Dallas does is the team most likely to be leading late, and a team that has spent all night defending is the team most likely to be out of gas when it matters.

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