The National Hockey League is an exciting, tough game that’s also extremely fast-paced. Each game is entertaining and even more so when you’re betting on it! When it comes to betting on the NHL conferences, you can bet on a number of betting options for each game, but you can also bet on the Conference Champions – called a futures wager – which allows you to try your hand to predict the winner outright.
As one of the main professional sports in the United States, betting on the NHL regular season is a huge market and allows thousands of betting options. The NHL has 32 teams, split into two conferences of 16 and each team plays 82 regular season games from October until April. That means there are over 2,600 NHL games in the regular season that you can bet on, and each game has plenty of betting types and options available.
At the end of the season, the NHL Playoffs occur and teams play in series playoff rounds to eventually wind up with two teams per conference. These two teams will face off in the Eastern Conference Championship and Western Conference Championship. When betting on the NHL conferences, you are betting on the outcome of these championships, respectively.
Eastern Conference Championship
As you might have figured out from its name, the Eastern Conference is made up of teams from the East coast, which are all relatively all located in Northeast America, as well as the Eastern Canadian provinces. The Eastern Conference is divided into two divisions: the Atlantic Division and the Metropolitan Division.
As you will learn in NHL Divisional betting, each division will have a favored team to win, but this will also occur in each conference. It’s interesting because divisional betting tends to be much easier to pick out a winner, as team’s strengths tend to fluctuate, having strong seasons, strong schedules and other factors. Injuries of star players tends to be a huge factor for team’s NHL Conference odds.
With the Eastern Conference, we usually see the usual suspects starting each season at the top of the odds board, including the Tampa Bay Lightning, Boston Bruins, Pittsburgh Penguins, and Washington Capitals. As you can imagine, the top prospects of the conference championship are also going to be huge favorites to win their respective divisions.
To bet on the NHL Eastern Conference Championship winner, you will assess these NHL odds, and decide which of the 16 teams you believe will win that Conference outright. It’s as simple as that.
Western Conference Championship
The Western Conference is made up of sixteen teams from the Western side of North America, with teams from both the United States and Canada. The conference is divided into two divisions: the Pacific Division and the Central Division.
When it comes to picking a winner for the Western Conference Championship, it helps to recognize the teams that traditionally will make the playoffs, which teams have won their respective divisions in the past, as well as looking at team’s strength of schedule. The Western Conference tends to be a little more evenly matched in terms of which teams to look for each season. There tends to be more fluctuation with teams making the playoffs or having strong seasons.
To bet on the NHL Western Conference Championship, you simply need to pick which team out of the 16 that you believe will win the Western Conference title. You will want to make this wager early in the season for the most value, especially if you’re picking a big underdog. You can always cash out your wager as well if the team ends up with injuries or underperforming through the season – however, you won’t get your full stake back if you wait too long.
Betting on the NHL Conferences is a great way to make the season a little more interesting and test out your skills predicting the future of the NHL regular season. Ensure you lock in your NHL bets on the best hockey odds in the United States.
