When midnight finally struck on the Golden Knights’ Cinderella run to the Stanley Cup final, bookmakers across Las Vegas breathed a sigh of relief.
Odds ran as high as 500-1 on the expansion National Hockey League franchise winning the championship in its first year. The sports book at the Westgate took 13 bets at that price, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The William Hill book took 350 futures bets on the Knights at 100-1 or greater and would have lost more than $1 million had Las Vegas taken the cup.
Overall, Las Vegas sports books stood to lose $5 million to $7 million.
Of course, that didn’t happen. The Washington Capitals beat the Knights 4-3 in Game 5 at the T-Mobile Arena on the Las Vegas Strip.
But that didn’t translate into big wins for the books either, given that the Capitals, whose title was the first in their 44-year history, also were a longshot—as long as 28-1 when they trailed the Columbus Blue Jackets 2-0 in their first-round playoff series.
The book at the Westgate paid out in six figures on the Capitals’ turnaround.
“We had to reduce the liability on the Knights at the expense of the other remaining teams, including the Capitals,” director Jay Kornegay said. “We were basically in a lose-lose situation. We lost a little less on them than we would’ve with the Knights.”
Boyd Gaming sports book director Bob Scucci dodged the same bullet. “We did OK, not great, because if you’re going to lose a ton on the Golden Knights, it makes sense at the beginning of the series to try to take a lot of Capitals money. In that respect, we reduced liability on the Knights but increased liability on the Capitals. We hedged every series, and we did the same thing on the Capitals. But we didn’t do as great as we would have if they played someone else other than the Golden Knights.”
The results mirrored what was a truly magical season for the Golden Knights: which is to say, the books won when the Knights lost and lost when they won.
But bettors still came out ahead on the Knights, who went 51-24-7 in the regular season and opened the postseason on a 13-3 streak.
“We’re down for sure on all the Knights games. But we’re fine with it. As citizens of this community, we’re certainly OK with it,” Kornegay, a Knights’ season-ticket holder, told the Review-Journal. “It’s been a great season for this city and this team. It was something new for the bookmakers, too. We’ve never seen this before, and we’ve never seen this in this sport before.”
“The handle was fantastic,” South Point sports book director Chris Andrews said. “In the end, we’ll make a little more money this year than we did last year (on the NHL). The handle was so good, it overcame whatever we lost on the Knights.”
Sunset Station sports book director Chuck Esposito said the NHL handle more than doubled this season because of the Knights, who generated 10 times as much action on their games as any other one on the board.
“With in-play (betting) and props, it kind of made it a wagering event for each Knights game,” he said. “This series has probably been the most heavily bet pro hockey final that I can ever remember.”
