Columbus Blue Jackets vs Minnesota Wild: Don’t expect a high-productive game

Prediction for the NHL match which will take place on January 7. Who will turn out to be stronger? Check the team conditions! Several betting options are available.

Columbus conducts a mediocre regular season. Another year, the Jackets are showing modest results, not joining the fight for cup spots. They have young and promising hockey players who are still gaining experience to finally make tangible progress in the foreseeable future. They've had some bad stretches during the current league season when they've lost by a bunch, but lately, they've been clinging to points more often: in the previous eight games, they've won three, lost three times out of regulation time, and been held scoreless two more times. All of that puts them in 15th place in the Eastern Conference standings.

We expected much stronger results from Minnesota in the regular season than they are showing. In recent years, the Wild have made the playoffs without much trouble, but now the solution to this problem is in great doubt. In the previous four games, they had lost two straight to Winnipeg - 2:4 and 2:3, followed by a 1:3 loss to Calgary, and the day before, they fell short against Tampa Bay - 1:4. A series of failures led to the fact that they rolled back to 13th place in the Western Conference standings.

Columbus and Minnesota are teams with completely different levels of ambition. In recent years, the Wild have become regular participants in cup battles that have been gradually preparing to make noise in the playoffs. Still, they are only in 13th place in the Western Conference, showing uneven results. The Jackets have everything stable; they annually go in the group of league outsiders, and therefore, their modest performance is not a sensation. Moreover, the head-to-head statistics also favor the team, according to which they have won three of the last four meetings.

The confrontation between Columbus and Minnesota does not often please us with high-goal-scoring activity. In the previous six head-to-head meetings, the rivals have combined to score only 27 pucks (4.50 average per game), which in itself is a low indicator by the standards of North American hockey, and the bookmakers' total over was only once (17%) in this stretch. In addition, the Jackets have only scored ten goals (1.67 per game on average).