The Seattle Kraken and Vegas Golden Knights — the NHL’s two newest franchises — will meet in the 2024 Winter Classic at T-Mobile Park in Seattle, Wash. on Monday afternoon.
The Winter Classic is always a game that gets circled on the calendar, but this iteration carries significant stakes for both teams as the Golden Knights are in the thick of the race for the Pacific Division and Presidents’ Trophy, while the Kraken are scrapping for a playoff position.
The defending champion Golden Knights are a -135 road favorite at the time of writing.
The Over/Under is currently sitting at 6.
Golden Knights vs. Kraken prediction
The Golden Knights seemed to put any worries of a Stanley Cup hangover to bed with a red-hot start to the season, but results have been hard to come by for the Knights as of late.
Vegas halted a five-game losing streak with an impressive win over the Los Angeles Kings on Thursday and is just 8-6-3 since Thanksgiving.
Seattle has taken a more perilous route to the Winter Classic.
The Kraken turned heads with a surprising run to the second round of the playoffs last spring, but that momentum sputtered at the start of 2023-24.
Seattle’s goaltending struggled out of the gate and the Kraken’s scoring stats came down in a big way, which wasn’t a huge shock to the crowd that predicted some negative regression for Seattle after it shot the lights out last season.
The Kraken have found their best form of the season of late, though, and will come into the Winter Classic riding a 6-1-3 run.
Seattle’s statistical profile suggests that this run has been well-earned as the Kraken rank second in high-danger scoring chance rate, 11th in expected goals percentage and second in 5-on-5 goal difference over their last 10 contests.
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Both of these teams are capable of playing grind-it-out, low-event hockey and that’s what I expect we’ll see on Monday.
I doubt either side will be able to run away with this contest and that makes backing the 60-minute draw (or the game to go to overtime) an appealing bet at +350.
The Bet: 60-minute draw (+350, DraftKings)