Player Props and NHL Anytime Goalscorer Bets

Shot Volume Metrics for NHL Goalscorer Bets

For two seasons I religiously bet Connor McDavid as an anytime goalscorer at every short price the UK books would post. The hit rate was respectable, the ROI was awful. The price was always too short, because the public always took him, and the books always knew. McDavid scores roughly four out of seven games — generous by any sensible measure — but at a -250 price you need a 71.4 % hit rate to break even, and even an elite winger does not reach that ceiling consistently. I switched away from chalk goalscorers, and the prop column on my tracker started looking healthier almost immediately.

Anytime scorer is the most heavily bet hockey prop on the UK market. That popularity is also why the value sits elsewhere on the same matchup card.

How the odds get priced

Books build anytime scorer prices from a combination of season scoring rate, ice time, and matchup adjustment. A player scoring at 0.4 goals per game with consistent top-six minutes gets priced around +120 to +150 on a standard matchup. Adjustments come from the opposing goalie’s save percentage, the opposing penalty-kill rate if the player is a PP threat, and any same-day line-up news.

The simple maths matters. An anytime scorer line at +150 implies a 40 % win rate. A player scoring at 0.4 goals per game has roughly that hit rate over a long sample, so +150 is approximately fair pricing on the average top-six forward. The edges appear where the book underweights a player’s role change, ignores PP-time spikes, or fails to adjust for an unusually favourable matchup.

The other half of the equation is the vig. UK books typically run anytime scorer markets at around 110 to 115 % overround, meaning across all listed players on a given game, the implied probabilities sum to noticeably more than 100 %. That vig is the cost of entry, and any edge you find has to clear it before you are profitable.

Shot volume beats name recognition

The strongest predictor of an anytime goal is shot volume, not season scoring rate. A player generating 3.5 shots per game converts at a meaningfully higher rate than a player generating 2.0 shots per game with the same scoring average, because variance in goal-scoring is partly randomness around shot count. Books know this, but the public does not — public money piles onto familiar names regardless of recent shot volume.

Look at the leaders in 5v5 shots-on-goal per 60 minutes and you will find names that are not at the top of the goal-scoring leaderboard but are scoring at fair-or-better prices in the anytime market. Second-line wingers on high-pace teams, third-line centres logging PP minutes, defencemen on PP-1 who fire from the point — these are the unglamorous categories that pay better long-run ROI than the star wingers everyone bets.

Winnipeg’s 32.7 % home power play in 2024-25 created several PP-only scorer angles where the public underbet the second-unit forwards because they assumed the goals would concentrate on the top line. They mostly did — but the second-unit goals at +400 were where the surplus value lived.

Power-play time and scorer odds

The single most useful piece of pre-game information for anytime scorer betting is the line-up confirmation that names the PP-1 unit. A player promoted to PP-1 for a single night because of an injury or coaching decision sees his expected goal rate spike by 30 to 40 % for that one game, and the books frequently do not adjust the prop price. That is the cleanest one-night edge in the prop market.

The cleanest example: a third-line winger gets bumped to PP-2 reps because PP-1 has an absent player. The book has him priced at +400 based on his season average. His actual one-night expectation is closer to +250 because he is now skating four to five additional minutes against the opposing penalty kill. Bet him at +400 and you are getting a substantial overlay on an updated input the book has not absorbed.

These spots do not appear every night. They appear maybe twice a week across the league. Tracking PP-1 deployment through the morning skate is the discipline that surfaces them.

First and last scorer variants

First scorer and last scorer markets are heavier-juice variants of anytime scorer. First scorer is mostly noise — early-game goals are randomly distributed across both teams’ rosters, and pricing each player on which one will score first creates a market that is almost impossible to beat consistently. The juice is steep enough to wipe out any modelling edge.

Last scorer is slightly more tractable because empty-net goals at the end of games are non-random. The team trailing late will pull the goalie, creating an empty-net goal opportunity for the leading team’s defensive forwards or defencemen — exactly the players the book often prices long because they are not natural scorers. A defensive forward at +1200 to score last is occasionally a fair bet if the matchup features a likely empty-net scenario, but the conditional structure is hard to read pre-game.

Both variants are entertainment markets more than serious betting markets for most punters. The juice cost is real and the modelling edge is small. Stick to anytime scorer unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise.

What I actually bet

My anytime scorer playbook has three rules. Avoid the top-billed star unless the price is genuinely off — which almost never happens. Look for role changes — line promotions, PP unit promotions, ice-time spikes — that have not yet been priced in. Bet plus-money names with strong shot volume and favourable matchups, because the variance pays you when they hit and does not cripple you when they miss.

Stakes are smaller on props than on game lines. One per cent of bankroll per anytime scorer ticket is the maximum I run, because the variance is high enough that a string of misses on +200 names will dent a bankroll that is staking too aggressively. The hit rate is around 33 to 38 % on these prices, which means seven misses in a row is statistically unremarkable. Plan for it.

For the shot-volume side of this same logic — where the role-player edge sits sharpest — the NHL shots-on-goal prop betting piece is the natural next read.

Prepared by the Ice Hockey Betting Tips editorial staff.