Chicago Blackhawks: New Stanley Cup 2020 odds

The Chicago Blackhawks had a down year but still have a shot at the Cup.

The Chicago Blackhawks didn’t have that good of a year in 2019-20. They went into the season with expectations of being a playoff team. Whether or not those were realistic expectations is a topic for another day but they failed to meet them nonetheless. This is a franchise trying to hang on to the last bit of hope they can before some extra hard times. Sometimes, that is what happens when the players who made you so good for so long start to move on.

They were sellers at the trade deadline which shows that even management saw their chances of being a playoff team as pretty much done. Well, not long after the trade deadline hit the coronavirus took over the continent and caused sports to shut down. That left people wondering if, when, and how the season would come back.

Well, there is still a lot of work to be done but if hockey comes back we know what it will look like. The Chicago Blackhawks will be in as part of the “play-in” series and their opponent will be the Edmonton Oilers. The five-game series will determine who goes on to participate in the traditional 16 team playoffs. It is a tall hill to climb for all 24 teams participating but especially tall for a bad team like the Blackhawks who barely made it.

Chicago Blackhawks have long odds to win the Cup.

Some odds are out on the table from Caesar’s Casino dot com and they are interesting, to say the least. The Hawks are plus-2000 to win the Western Conference. Of course, they have bad odds because they were an awful team this year. The thing that is surprising is the fact that the Arizona Coyotes, Winnipeg Jets, and Minnesota Wild have worse odds than Chicago.

As for the Stanley Cup, Chicago is +5000. That is extremely low odds of winning when teams like the Boston Bruins, Tampa Bay Lightning, and Vegas Golden Knights are sitting there at +600. The weird thing about this one as well is that there are teams with lower odds than Chicago in both conferences. The Columbus Blue Jackets, Montreal Canadiens, Arizona Coyotes, New York Islanders, Winnipeg Jets, Florida Panthers, and Minnesota Wild all have worse odds.

The reason that is all surprising is that the Blackhawks were a worse team than pretty much all of them in the regular season. The only team that had fewer standings points is the Montreal Canadiens. The Hawks are the last seeded team in the Western Conference yet gamblers think they have a better chance than some of the other teams that had great years.

The Blackhawks have lots of experience in the playoffs at the top of their lineup. Guys like Patrick Kane, Jonathan Toews, Duncan Keith, Brandon Saad, and Corey Crawford have all won multiple Cups. This could be part of the reason that gamblers put some money on them. If Crawford and Kane carrier their team on their backs during a strange scenario, anything is possible.