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

Vancouver +184 over NY Rangers

9:00 PM EST. This is a numbers play, and the numbers are not close to honest. The Rangers are laying minus 225 on the road, which means they have to win this game roughly seven times out of ten just to break even, and they are asking you to believe that about a team playing its fourth road game in seven nights. Seattle on Saturday, Edmonton on Monday, Calgary on Wednesday, Vancouver on Friday, every one of them a late start in New York time, and then a flight home to face Montreal on Monday. The bags are packed. The minds are already on the plane. The fourth game of a road trip is where good teams go through the motions, and the Rangers are a good team that has already banked two wins on this trip and knows the hard part is over.

The scheduling dash is the whole spice rack. Vancouver has had three days off since Monday, sitting at home, practising, resting, waiting for a team that has been living out of a suitcase for a week. The Rangers are going to walk into Rogers Arena, look across at a team with seven points in twenty games, and assume the two points are already in the bank. That is exactly how a minus 225 favourite loses to a plus 184 dog. Complacency is not a stat you can look up, but it is real, and it shows up in the fourth game of a trip against a team nobody respects.

And the Rangers are not invincible even when they are focused. Igor Shesterkin is out for the season, so the net belongs to Dylan Garand and Joonas Korpisalo, and New York scores just 2.94 goals a game. This is not a team that blows people out. It grinds, it wins 3-1, and it loses 3-1 when the bounces go the other way. Vancouver has Elias Pettersson with 20 points and Brock Boeser with seven goals, Filip Chytil is due back from injury, and the Canucks have had three days to prepare for one game. At plus this chunky number, you do not need Vancouver to be good. You need the Rangers to be tired, and they are.

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