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

Calgary +105 over San Jose

9:00 PM EST. The goal in hockey is to possess the puck and create opportunities, and you can only do that in the offensive end. The NHL tracks the actual clock time the puck spends in each zone, and the even-strength rankings for this season tell the story of tonight's game before a puck is even dropped: Calgary ranks 14th in the league at 41.2 percent offensive zone time, while San Jose ranks 28th at 38.4 percent. One team spends its nights attacking. The other spends its nights defending.

The old proxy agrees with the new clock. Calgary's CF% at five-on-five is 52.05 percent, 12th in the league, against San Jose's 44.62 percent, 28th. The shot-attempt numbers and the zone-time numbers are measuring the same thing two different ways, and both say Calgary owns the puck and San Jose chases it. That is the whole handicap. Possession in the offensive end is where chances come from, and Calgary creates them while San Jose survives them.

Flip it around and the tool is just as revealing. Take a team like Washington, ranked 26th in even-strength zone time at 39.4 percent, yet sitting on a winning record. When a team with a low possession-time ranking is winning games, it is very luck-driven. Good results on bad process do not hold, just as bad results on good process do not last. Calgary is the other side of that coin. The Flames' actual goals share at five-on-five is just 35.00 percent despite a 53.09 percent expected goals share, with a high-danger save percentage of 77.11. Had they had good goaltending early in the season, their record would have been much better. The process is strong and the results are not, and that gap is exactly what a buy-low is supposed to look like.

Calgary is a small-market Canadian team that has been bad for a really long time, and the market still prices the jersey instead of the team. The time to buy low on the Flames is now, before the market catches up to how good they truly are. At plus money you are getting the team that lives in the offensive end against a team that ranks near the bottom of the league in actually being there.

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