The 2021-22 NHL Season could come to an end on Friday night as the Colorado Avalanche look to eliminate the Tampa Bay Lightning in Game 5 at Ball Arena in Denver, Colo. 

The Avalanche are -190 favorites to win Game 5 and currently sit at a whopping -1400 to win the Stanley Cup. The Over/Under for Friday night’s tilt sits at 6 with the under slightly juiced to -115. And even though we saw our first under of the series on Wednesday night, there are some signals pointing to a high-event contest on Friday night.

We’ll build our prop card with that in mind.

On the surface it looks like it’s been a relatively quiet series for Nathan MacKinnon. Colorado’s offensive talisman has just one goal and three points through four games and his lone tally was a fortunate deflection off his skate on the power play. 

But if you take a deeper look, you’d see that MacKinnon is still doing his thing — he just isn’t really getting rewarded for it. MacKinnon has racked up 22 shots in the Stanley Cup Final for an average of 5.5 per game. No other player in this series has more than 16 total SOG. 

MacKinnon should also benefit from the game environment on Friday night as it seems likely we’ll see a pretty open contest with the Lightning in a do-or-die spot. And with the Avalanche at home, Jared Bednar can get the matchups he wants for MacKinnon’s line, which should be a huge benefit for both the player and team.

With their backs against the wall, the Lightning may have no choice but to open things up in Game 5. You can expect the Avalanche to come out like a house on fire in the first period and if Colorado breaks through early, this could turn into a track meet pretty quickly.

Darcy Kuemper was sharp in Game 4, but he’s still been less than stellar throughout the entire postseason. If these two teams go up and down the ice all night, Tampa should be able to pot a couple past the Avalanche and do everything it can to keep pace with the Avs.

When building a Same-Game Parlay, you want to come up with a potential game-script and build off of that with correlating wagers. For this one, the foundation is a bet that this will be a wide-open contest where Andrei Vasilevskiy proves to be the difference and is able to make a couple more saves than Darcy Kuemper. If that is how the game shakes out, the Lightning puckline, Over 6.5 and First-Period Over 1.5 all make sense.

To add some value to the card, you can add a couple of anytime goalscorers. You can read the case for MacKinnon above. As for Stamkos, it’s all about opportunity. With the Lightning playing in a do-or-die spot, Jon Cooper’s first line will have no choice but to lean on his best line. And if the game opens up, as we are angling for in this bet, Stamkos’ line should have opportunities off the rush and he is their best finisher.

A lot would have to go right for this bet to win, but it could be the last game of the season, so why not take a shot on a longshot SGP to go out with a bang?