The Edmonton Oilers and Minnesota Wild will meet for the first time since the Wild’s blockbuster acquisition of Quinn Hughes Saturday, in what promises to be a very exciting NHL matchup. While the Wild will continue to enjoy the presence of Hughes, the Oilers will be without recently acquired goaltender Tristan Jarry, who suffered a lower-body injury on Thursday in Boston.
Both sides should be up for this high-profile matchup, and we should be treated to an excellent game Saturday afternoon. At +290 (bet365), there looks to be some value with our simple same game parlay targeting a high-scoring Oilers win, an angle which has worked out for us previously this season.
- Edmonton Oilers Moneyline (+100 straight bet odds)
- Over 6.5 Total Goals (+100 straight bet odds)
Nick’s Oilers/Wild SGP
Leg 1—Edmonton Oilers Moneyline (+100 straight bet odds)
It will be strength on strength in this matchup, as one of the NHL’s best defensive teams will look to shut down a scorching hot Oilers attack led by Connor McDavid, who’s in one of the hottest stretches of play of his surefire Hall-of-Fame career.
The Wild’s elite defensive play won out when these teams last met on December 2nd in Edmonton, as Jesper Wallstedt stopped all 33 shots he faced in a 1-0 win. Since that loss, the Oilers are 6-2-0 and have scored an average of 4.75 goals per game.
Edmonton’s group of bottom-six forwards still looks entirely unconvincing, and it probably needs to bring in at least one impactful forward to believe it can have a realistic chance of making its way out of a top-heavy Western Conference come the postseason. Still, the Oilers lineup looks much more formidable now that Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Zach Hyman are back in the mix, and their returns have certainly helped power McDavid’s incredible recent output.
Over the last eight games, the Oilers power play has succeeded on 39.3% of opportunities. While power play results can be highly volatile, their five-man unit of McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Evan Bouchard, Nugent-Hopkins, and Hyman projects as one of the best in the league, and they are capable of winning out versus even the league’s best penalty kills.
Head coach Kris Knoblauch also seems to have found something with a second line of Draisaitl, Vasely Podkolzin, and Matthew Savoie. In 93.1 minutes of play, the three hold a 61.9% expected goal share and have scored 3.87 goals per 60.
With Calvin Pickard likely to start in goal, however, the Oilers may need to score four or more goals in this matchup in order to earn a victory, something they have done quite often of late, and much of my thinking here is similar to the last time we played this same parlay in a game involving the Oilers.
So though the Wild have won six straight and are currently being put into the Stanley Cup contender conversation, I’m willing to take a shot with the red-hot Oilers given my belief that backing Edmonton to win this game correlates quite well with our second leg backing the game to feature over 6.5 goals.
Over 6.5 Total Goals (+100 straight bet odds)
As we touched on, the Oilers offence has been in tremendous form of late, and I’m not sold that even the Wild can slow them down given the way McDavid and Draisaitl are rolling right now and the way the top power-play unit has performed recently.
Pickard holds an .857 save percentage and a 3.91 GAA in nine appearances this season. However, it seems unlikely that the Oilers will win this game if they can’t generate a solid offensive output. Minnesota’s top power-play unit has looked excellent since the addition of Hughes, who has also helped the team generate some high-quality scoring chances at even strength while playing with another strong puck-mover in Brock Faber.
I’m not expecting the Oilers to win this game by a margin, but it seems like a good spot to target a game script where Knoblauch leans heavily upon his top two units to try and score their way out of trouble versus a Wild side that does currently have some depth concerns.
If you really wanted to spice it up, you could bet both teams to score three goals and the Oilers to win at north of +400, but I’m happy with a price of +290 to target the Oilers winning a game that features over 6.5 total goals.
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