NHL Betting tips – What can bettors learn from the Western Canada road trip?

If recent history tells us anything, the Edmonton Oilers are about to catch some wind and sail out of the doldrums.

The Philadelphia Flyers play their third consecutive game in western Canada when they visit the Oilers at Rogers Place on Tuesday evening. They eked out a 3-2 shootout win to open the season on Friday in Vancouver and then dropped a 6-3 decision to the Calgary Flames on Saturday.

This western Canada road swing is a trip that comes up somewhat frequently for NHL teams, as the league looks for efficiencies in travel. In the previous three seasons, there have been 27 such road trips in which a team, in no particular order, will play the Vancouver Canucks, Flames and Oilers in consecutive road games.

This season, the trip amplifies in frequency, as the journey will be made 17 times by teams not including the Canucks, Flames and Oilers. Furthermore, 12 of the teams making the trip this season are, like the Flyers, coming over from the Eastern Conference.

As road trips go, it’s a particularly distant one that takes most teams out of their home country for a few days. Given how often this particular western Canada trip will come up this season, it’s worth going over some of the recent history to look for any trends.

In only the third game of the 27 three-game series’ in the past three seasons, the Canucks, Flames and Oilers have combined for a record of 15-12. The Canucks are 5-9, the Flames are 6-2 and the Oilers are 4-1 heading into Tuesday’s tilt. Tuesday’s game is made particularly interesting because, for the second consecutive season, the Oilers have started poorly. In fact, this season’s 0-3 outscored by a 15-3 start is even worse than last season’s 1-2 outscored by 13-10 after three games margin.

But in those five games in recent seasons in which the Oilers are the final leg of the trip, they have outscored opponents 26-11 and easily covered the spread in the four out of five games they won. Overall, Eastern Conference teams doing the trip are 7-8, but against the spread the result is 5-10. Overall, the Flames, Canucks and Oilers have combined to go 17-10 against the spread in…