The $888 AboMNable Snowman

The NBA was off on Wednesday, leading to a massive contest in the Wednesday NHL DK Lobby, a rare sight especially considering there were only 5 games in the NHL on Wednesday! With the NBA Cup wrapping up on Tuesday night, apparently the 28 teams not participating in the championship(?) game(?) (ok, I know it was just one game, as in Vegas I learned upon arrival that there were three NBA games at T-Mobile with the semifinals included. who knew!) needed some time off to recover, seeing as it is All About The Cup™. At least, that’s what I hear on TV seven hundred times each spring.

I broke down the 5-game slate with DJ Mitchell on the Morning Skate Podcast, which you should subscribe to here (YT with some screen share visuals) and here (in podcast form) so that you have access to it any time we post, typically on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but also for special slates (and the Holidays in general being a special circumstance). If you missed it, our preview is only 59 minutes, you can 2x it easily and it’s worth a re-watch in the aftermath if you’re really interested in where my head was at heading into the slate.

As a reminder, this is just a part of a series of these types of reviews: Last year’s contest reviews are also on the newsletter, and are threaded for your convenience here: https://x.com/FakeMoods/status/1853496293907161165

As far as 2024, I reviewed November’s contest here: https://moods.beehiiv.com/p/november-2024-barn-bash and October’s here: https://moods.beehiiv.com/p/2024-oct-spin-o-rama

Here’s the Rainbow Sheet for Wednesday - there’s a lot more discussion and context about both the teams and the players on the podcast:

• Critically, this slate had a decent mix of positive and negative matchups (at 5v5) based on xG performance. However, looking to the right some more, the game Corsi paces were all rather low (only TOR-DAL and WPG-ANA profiled as average here) and the Goal paces were absolutely abysmal. Nearly every team had a “double-bad” matchup, where they were not scoring much at 5v5 and their opponent was not allowing much.

• TOR-DAL stood out from an xG perspective, but the lack of goal-scoring at 5v5 has been a concern all year for the Leafs and Stars alike, especially without Tyler Seguin (imagine writing that sentence in 2024… hurry back, Tyler, Duchene and Marchment miss you!). Thus, two of the four “good” matchups were terrifying, at best.

• WPG was on a back-to-back, on the road, starting Eric Comrie. Make that three.

• PHI heading into DET has been playing fine, but with the team’s offense consisting of just Scott Laughton and Torts openly bashing his top line in the media, the run of two-plus weeks with no line changes felt tenuous at best. Four for four on scary spots!

As far as Wednesday’s developments:

• FLA was swapping out Bennett for Barkov, the latter of whom returned from the flu. While FLA looked to profile quite rough at 5v5, I personally went from considering MAF in net to ignoring it, as Barkov is a lethal playmaker, whereas Bennett will fire pucks from any location. I felt confident that MAF would get a fair amount of ownership, at home vs. FLA, and thus felt little desire to play this “favorite” in a game I had little conviction toward, one way or the other.

• There was no confirmation on DAL availability, but some callups on the blue-line indicated that at least one of Harley or Lundkvist would be unable to go. The rest of the lineup was a troubling question mark, given the flu bug going around the room.

• Very late in the day, WPG activated Nikolaj Ehlers from IR, indicating he would likely return to the lineup. With that being the late game, lines/PP units would not be known for sure, and he was priced at $5.9k, far from a can’t-miss value.

• I’m not sure that anything else changed for me on Wednesday, other than consuming some content and informing my “ownership feelings” around the slate as a result. To highlight some other cliff notes from the podcast that perhaps were relevant:

  • JT Miller’s return threw a wrench into the PP1, as he was not on the PP1 in their most recent game, instead all three of DeBrusk, Garland, and Boeser were PP1.

  • DET mixed up virtually everything to do with their 5v5 lines and PP units.

  • MIN1 and ANA1 were each perfectly PP1 correlated, a rarity for this slate.

  • I feel like I shouldn’t even admit this, but here it goes… ANA scratching Brett Leason actually made me more interested in WPG1 and less interested in goalie/one-off stuff from ANA. I think he’s actually good, and I also hate rewarding coaches for doing braindead shit like icing Ross Johnston.

What I Played

After approximately 80 minutes of airport building, rebuilding, and some late edits post-lock, I wound up with the following:

Just your classic 6-man TOR stack with Woll in net, Drysdale and Guenther as the two one-offs. How I got there is a bit more interesting than usual, because I truly had no idea what I wanted to do opening up the slate, even after the rainbow chart:

• I started off by building all sorts of teams, to spare the details these ranged from TOR 6-man stacks (but not what I landed on, most of which included Patches and/or Rielly) to UTA 5-man stacks, with FLA, DAL, PHI, and even some DET mixed in. Nothing felt great, but I really liked TOR1 and wasn’t sniffing much ownership there.

• My “original” final team was a UTA 4 stack of Guenther, Sergachev, Crouse, and Maccelli, with Vejmelka in goal. I did this to afford a Matthews one-off, Morrissey one-off, and a Michkov-Frost mini-stack.

• I then thought deeply about my life’s choices and realized that in effect, Michkov-Morrissey could be turned into Marner-Ekblad by sacrificing only a couple hundred elsewhere, such as in goal. So with a few minutes to lock, I moved off of PHI forwards. Not enough value and they sapped all ability to react to Dallas lineup news, where DAL1 was still of interest to me if the team was back to full strength.

• I finagled some more with the build and went into lock with this beautiful squad:

  

• I didn’t have the Sergachev link between Guenther and Bjugstad/Maccelli, but I was ok with Sergachev having a Decent Game if it allowed me to fit in Guenther with TOR1. Drysdale hasn’t done much with his opportunity so far, but he’s manning the PP1 with tons of TOI at 5v5, plays a style that I absolutely love, and gave me pretty good exposure to Michkov, in case of nuke. On a team where I knew I needed D value, I was happy to lock that in even if it was slightly limiting to my swaptions.

• It was at this point, maybe 7:10 EST, that the DAL nukes dropped: Bourque up to L1, Wyatt L3, and Harley-Lundkvist both out. This left DAL rostering a third pair of Brendan Smith and Alex Petrovic.

• Similarly, TOR redesigned their d-pairs and put OEL alongside Rielly. With TOR1 and Woll effectively locked in, in how I was thinking about things, I felt as if TOR3 could be totally fine with just one or possibly two goals, so I moved out Bjugstad and Maccelli for Max Domi and Nick Robertson. This freed up money to get from Haydn Fleury to OEL, too, completing a secondary PP2 stack and giving me some common ground between TOR1 and TOR3 goals (as OEL could theoretically assist on either, especially with Nylander on the PP2 lately as well as PP1).

• It was not an explicit plan to overstack TOR, but I wanted to all day given how I saw the slate developing, so I am very happy with how I played and reacted to the Dallas situation. Virtually everything that was “up in the air” turned out against the Stars. I’m confident that had DAL had Harley/Lundkvist or kept a beefed-up top line, I would have altered my approach sufficiently (or left the team alone) to still make positive-expectation decisions post-lock.

Results:

With 147 spots cashing, I slipped into the money in the $888 with a 135th place finish. I won the first satellite I entered for this contest (a $140 entry SD contest with BOS-PIT that only filled 5/7 or something like that), and maybe sprinkled in 4-5 more attempts at a $43 price point for NFL Sundays, so the $1350 returned was a substantial return on investment.

By overstacking the second game of the night, I also got this cool screenshot:

From this point on, Woll obviously racked up a ton of third period saves, and Nylander did manage the ENG to seal it. Nick Robertson lost a block in the intermission and never got the bonus back (or anything else), and I don’t think Matthews, Marner, Domi, or OEL added a single fantasy point to the mix in the third period, either.

Had Toronto scored a sixth or even seventh goal, the leaderboard was packed up tightly enough that it wasn’t far-fetched to imagine a late-night sweat, but I’ll book a solid W for the slate (even finishing third in the buda, IYKYK) and get to the real story.

What Won:

nolt0032 is better known as MN Matt, CA Billy, or as I prefer to call him: “someone with substantially more wealth than me who should be the only person who has to pay for the Morning Skate Podcast”.

There’s one minor problem with that, however, as I think he’d just move on from the MSP stable of donkeys to form his own squadron:

Good luck with that, Matt. I’m keeping this no matter what you do next (ht Mikekat who created this, along with other MSP Discord emoji mainstays):

nolt0032 was the beneficiary of a wild run of events to close out the 10PM games, as FLA had looked to run away with the slate (and thus bbmon had looked to run away with this contest) with their resounding 6-1 win. First, Vatrano ties the game with a few minutes to go on a 60-foot floater through traffic, then Guenther scores with a 12-6 curveball to send Demko down looking and tie that game up. Troy Terry then wins it for Anaheim with seconds to go, capping off an incredibly lackluster effort from WPG (who allowed the first 11 shots of this game, as well. woof!), with Vatrano getting the assist and three-point bonus to go with his shots bonus and two goals.

At this point, I’m not sure if the slate is decided or not (live scoring was wrong, with Guenther’s goal not being credited to him until after the game for… reasons), and I’m surely not going back through the play-by-play to determine how someone else won $200k, but UTA then caps off a wild OT period with a Sergachev GWG from Cooley in the dying seconds.

All three of our podium finishers had Sergachev and Cooley, though Matt beat out second by just over 6 points with Vejmelka, so an OT loss wouldn’t have been enough (though a SO loss might have?). All four of these goals occurred within 15 minutes of each other on one of the most down-to-the-wire slates I can recall, as even in the early stages of the later games the leaders had never pulled away from the pack.

nolt won with a conventional UTA PP 4-stack, ANA1, and had enough left for a one-off Ekblad at D after plugging in Vejmelka.

bbmon swapped out Guenther for Schmaltz in the UTA PP 4-stack, using the salary to help get to Tkachuk/Verhaeghe alongside Ekblad, finishing the team off with a JT Compher one-off and Bob in goal.

driverseati also played ANA1, but stacked only three UTA PP1 members and closed off the build with Kane and Seider.

#1 and #2 were perfectly well-constructed, no issues here. driverseati made a concerted effort to jam in Patrick Kane despite him not being on PP1 with Seider, which is the only odd part. Since Seider is such a floor-based player, racking up shots/blocks with the best of them, and Kane was definitely in play as a one-off at just $4.4k, it’s not an egregious error by any stretch to pair these two teammates, but a decision that stands out as a takeaway in comparison to the other two top finishers.

Field Analysis:

• Every single team on this five-game slate, 10 in total, had at least one player who was 10% owned or more. It was a wide-open slate, and the sims/projections clearly agreed.

• 17 lineups, or 2.3% of the field, used Esa Lindell against Joseph Woll in their lineups. I’m not sure how Esa Lindell gets there without a random assist or goal (and possibly needs 2 assists?), and Cicima was a main offender, doing this in 5 or more lineups, but 11 players in total deployed this “strategy”. There were so many options in the $3K range, you need to understand that Lindell is going to actively hurt you 2% of the time or less, so playing him at 20% against your 20% goalie is just foolish. If something like Johnston and Stankoven were out to the flu and Bourque was clearly going to play PP1, I’d be more understanding of using him against Woll, despite the obvious anticorrelation of F and G, as value was very hard to come by at forward.

• J.T. Compher was PP1 at $3.1k, and Bobby Brink was $2.9k. These were the only two PP1 forwards below even $4k, and I was very surprised that neither came in with much ownership. Compher was much more owned at 9% than Brink’s 2%, but I thought that game would get heavier ownership in general. Compher has a decidedly good role on this team, was PP1, and despite not being in the top six was so cheap for the PP role that it seemed obvious that he would come in the 15-20% range. While TOR1 didn’t get there and the TOR3 pieces I used were pretty good too, had I known Compher’s ownership sat below 10% I probably would have plugged him in as a one-off in pursuit of the TOR1 alpha-jam.

• Speaking of which, on a night of mid-tier supremacy, shout out to me for having the best TOR1 stack in the contest, and I believe the only one to cash on the night. Had they met even their 75th percentile with some shot bonuses or 3-point bonuses, I’m able to pretty quickly close the 50-point gap to first place. Those three players against that Dallas blue-line at 5% combined ownership (with all three together) is something I’ll do every night of the week.

• Of the other full PP1 correlated lines - WPG1 checked in at 13% combined, MIN1 12.5%, FLA1 8%, ANA1 6%. Especially with LaCombe checking in as the cheap chalk play on D, ANA1 was probably too low-owned facing off against Eric Comrie and a tired Jets team.

• Price was a major factor, as alluded to with the lack of PP1 value forwards on this smaller slate, but I felt good about a handful of really cheap spots to play TOR1 that the field clearly did not. TOR3 was obviously low-owned as you can see above for yourselves, we’ve discussed Compher already, but ARI3 was intriguing to me and popped up in a few different places I saw. I thought for sure they were going to be owned when 7PM came and DET was relatively light on ownership. Yet, only 6 lineups played any two-man of Maccelli, Crouse, and Bjugstad, and just one brave soul full stacked that line. And yes, KevinRob2128 did play it with a TOR1 + Morgan Rielly stack. Lundell & Luostorinen weren’t cheap when comined with Samson Reinhart, but on their own they were quite cheap, considering without Bennett they were the de facto second line, and paid off their tags handily with a combined ~26 points. Only 13 people played this pair, six of whom did so without Reinhart.

• In a field of 750, this all surprised me. The field very clearly defaulted to the mid-tier on this particular slate. All of this comes from the FantasyLabs (or Rotogrinders? I access it through Labs…) free Contest Dashboard.

• Some free advice? Spend a few hours going slate by slate through nolt0032’s approach to high stakes GPPs. low/mid ones, too, if you want, but definitely the big ones. Matt’s truly the best NHL GPP player out there, and solidified as much with not just the $888 win, but also booking a trip to the FHWC with that same lineup.

I had a brief sweat, made a bit of money, and a legitimately great NHL DFS player took the contest down. Outside of, you know, winning it myself or ending the night with a sweat and a significant win, it was about as good of a night as I could hope for for this review.

Congrats to all the winners, my condolences to all the losers, and Happy Holidays to everyone!

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this recap, be sure to subscribe to the Newsletter and to The Morning Skate Podcast, a podcast covering every Tuesday and Thursday NHL DFS slate throughout the season.

Follow me on Twitter - (1) Matt Moody (@FakeMoods) / X,- and DM me if you want in the MSP Discord, where a dedicated group discusses news, plays, and sweats out every NHL slate.