Select Location

Stanley Cup Odds | Latest Stanley Cup Odds 2024

Author

Adam Thompson

+1 Other

Edited by

Shannon Lane

Last Updated: Jun 17^th, 2024

Welcome to the ultimate Stanley Cup betting guide! Below you will find tips and strategies to help you wager on the Stanley Cup Finals, which mark the culmination of the NHL betting season.

Who is Favored to Win Stanley Cup 2024?

The Florida Panthers are heavy favorites to win the Stanley Cup in 2024. All major sports betting sites have them favored to win.

Compare odds across online sportsbooks below:

How do Stanley Cup Playoffs Work?

After an 82-game regular season, a Stanley Cup finalist will have played three best-of-seven series to reach the Final.

Playoff series are structured in a 2-2-1-1-1 format, meaning the team with the best regular season record is afforded four home games if the series goes to seven. That team with the best record host the first two games, then the other team for two, with single-game stands staged for the next three games of the series, if needed.

This format allows each team to host at least two games.

That’s at least 12 games (in the case of a sweep) and up to 21 in a compressed amount of time.

That’s physically and emotionally grueling. Injuries, therefore, are a massive consideration, as is fatigue, in assessing which players and therefore which teams can win.

Types of Stanley Cup Finals Bets

Popular NHL betting markets feature numerous ways to wager on the final, including team and individual bets that allow ice hockey betting fans expanded opportunities to exploit their handicapping prowess.

Stanley Cup betting is unique because you have the ability to bet individual games, as well as the entirety of the series.

How to Read Stanley Cup Odds & Betting Lines

Moneylines are based on positive and negative figures and indicate how much money a bettor must wager to win $100, or how much a $100 bet would win. Negative numbers indicate how much bettors must play to win $100.

Let's look at a few examples:

If the moneyline is -140, a $140 bet is required to win $100. Positive numbers indicate the winnings from a $100 bet.
If the moneyline is +160, a successful $100 bet would yield $160. Calculate winnings on different bet amounts by scaling the figure up or down proportionally, remaining cognizant of whether the number is positive or negative. Puck lines are a means of augmenting a moneyline bet and are similar to point spreads. In this system, though, the favorite must win by 1.5 goals or the underdog keep the score within that same range.
If the moneyline is -140, a +1.5 puck line bet requires the them to win by at least two (the decimal assures no ties). If the Western Conference champion is the underdog at +160, a -1.5 puck line bet requires the Maple Leafs to keep the score within that amount of goals of the Eastern champs.

Totals Betting

Betting total goals involves venturing on how many goals will be scored in a single game by both teams combined. If the Over/Under for a Stanley Cup Finals game is at 6.0, the bet would be whether the teams reach that figure combined.

Futures Betting

Futures bets involve season-long goals for both teams and players. These can be bets on whether a team will win the Stanley Cup, the Eastern or Western Conference Championship, their division title or enough games to simply make the playoffs.

If a fan makes a bet on the eventual Stanley Cup champion, and that team reaches the final, they are sure to be entertained, nervous, and quite possibly quite a bit richer, depending on whether they took a long shot.

In their first season in 2017-2018, the Vegas Golden Knights drew +50000 odds to win the Stanley Cup. They reached the finals, incredibly, but the Washington Capitals lifted the trophy for the first time, ending the series in six games. The following season, the St. Louis Blues, at one point a 250-1 shot to win it all, captured the Stanley Cup.

Live Betting

NHL games are played over three 20-minute periods, so live betting within those parameters can be an entertaining way to bet, reassess, and try another strategy. It is therefore beneficial to know whether a team excels in a particular period in terms of scoring or has a good record when leading or trailing after a specific point in the game.

Goalies will have much to do with this analysis.

Any team would prefer to score early and often and clamp down for the rest of the game, but few are able. Study their trends. Numbers will present a picture of mindset and patterns.

Stanley Cup Betting Tips & Strategies

Make Note of Recent Trends

Past truisms have been challenged in recent Stanley Cup Playoffs. While home-ice advantage was once a prime determiner of success, road teams have begun to negate those norms. The 2018 Stanley Cup champion Capitals lost the first two games of their first-round series against Columbus at home and won the next four games to advance.

While teams that had played together for seasons were supposed to possess the proper resolve for a postseason grind, the Vegas Golden Knights became the first expansion team to advance to the Cup final in 2018, falling to the Caps in six games.

There have been 28 teams to come back from 3-1 or 3-0 deficits to win series, with 26 of those comebacks occurring since 1987 and seven since 2010. In that year, the Flyers became the first team to come back from a 3-0 deficit, doing so against the Bruins in the Eastern Conference semifinals. The feat was repeated by the Kings against the San Jose Sharks in 2014.

Even being the best team in the league, statistically, does not carry a distinct advantage in the NHL. The postseason is such a travail that even teams that end the season as the odds-on favorite have lost in recent years early and often.

The team with the most points in both conferences wins the Presidents' Trophy and is viewed as the "champion" in a sense of the regular season. But since the 2002-2003 season, only two Presidents' Trophy winners have gone on to win the Stanley Cup.

The Presidents’ Trophy winner was eliminated in the first round four times from the 2005-2006 season through 2011-2012. No winner of the hardware has advanced past the second round (as of 2018) since the Chicago Blackhawks won the Cup in 2012-2013.

Monitor Line Pairings

There are often four different offensive lines and three defensive pairings. Coaches will often shift them throughout playoffs to maximize their lineups and capitalize on mismatches. Some lines, known as checking lines, are defensive-based and meant to slow down a particularly deadly line.

These lines can change at any moment depending on matchup, health or performance.

Since playing an entire 60 minutes is impossible, there are no guarantees that the top scorers on a team will all be on the same line. A coach may split up his most gifted players to make his team deeper. Familiarity among line mates brings crucial chemistry throughout the season as a line's chemistry can make all the difference in a team's season.

Study Special Teams Stats

One unique statistical category to hockey that often provides distinct advantages are teams' power plays and penalty kill percentages. When a player commits a rules infraction during a game, he is sent to the penalty box for either two or five minutes depending on the severity of the infraction.

This results in a 5-on-4 advantage for the other team, known as a power play, while the other team's shorthanded "penalty kill" unit attempts to defensively thwart the opponent.

Mastery in either field plays a big factor over the ebb and flow of a game. Scoring on a power play or coming up with a successful kill are often key momentum-shifting moments.

Prepare for the Unexpected

Stanley Cup betting is often trickier than regular season betting because part often players who were pedestrian in the regular season elevate into statistical anomalies and folk heroes with the postseason adventures.

For example, Washington Capitals right wing Devante Smith-Pelly, a career journeyman, needed 75 games to net seven goals in the 2017-2018 regular season, but just seven games to reach the same mark—two of them game-winners—in the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Hope is not a plan, and momentum and positive energy don’t seem like sound metrics when analyzing a matchup, but all part of the lore and reality of the Stanley Cup.

Recent Stanley Cup Winners

Year	Winner	Runner-Up	Series Result
2023	Vegas Golden Knights	Florida Panthers	4-1
2022	Colorado Avalanche	Tampa Bay Lightning	4-2
2021	Tampa Bay Lightning	Montreal Canadiens	4-1
2020	Tampa Bay Lightning	Dallas Stars	4-2
2019	St. Louis Blues	Boston Bruins	4-3
2018	Washington Capitals	Vegas Golden Knights	4-1
2017	Pittsburgh Penguins	Nashville Predators	4-2
2016	Pittsburgh Penguins	San Jose Sharks	4-2
2015	Chicago Blackhawks	Tampa Bay Lightning	4-2
2014	Los Angeles Kings	New York Rangers	4-1
2013	Chicago Blackhawks	Boston Bruins	4-2
2023	Los Angeles Kings	New Jersey Devils	4-2

References

NHL 2023-24 Rulebook