Spin-O-Rama DraftKings DFS NHL Contest Review

Tuesday brought about the first giant contest of the 24-25 season, with $100k up for grabs in the $360 entry, $300k prize pool Spin-O-Rama.

I broke down the 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 every Tuesday and Thursday (and some other days when the schedule and contests warrant it!). If you missed it, it’s worth a re-watch in the aftermath, if you want to fully wrap your head around my thoughts on this fun 9-game slate.

Heading into the slate, this is what I was seeing of relevance:

• EDM blending together the two-headed McDrai monster was referred to as “sneaky” across every show I tuned in to in a matchup with Philly as massive favorites. Despite looking to be 8-15% wherever I looked, I suspect based on the lack of other high-end options on the slate that McDavid sniffs 30% and Draisaitl in the 20-25 range, with Hyman and Bouchard coming in around 8-9%. This is at least double what I was seeing on all of these players in projections.

• EDM1 is clearly a good play, but forces you into a pretty narrow range of CBJ and DAL values or going off the board for some other poor spots that based on salary dynamics would inflate from 1% to the 4-5% range. I’ll revisit this for some examples with the full set of lineups/exposures to review. Post-Edit: In retrospect, I’m not sure this occurred. Monahan as a one-off at $3.3k was 29% owned, dwarfing his also-chalky linemates, but I think the field ownership of PHI and CHI might have to do with the cheap availability of wings alongside McDrai. Maybe 4% PLD qualifies for this?

• Dallas as the other massive favorite on the slate has three lines that are all uncertain - Seguin out, Mavrik Bourque in (at $2.5k), and no lineup certainty with all three top lines up for grabs. My best guess was Wyatt top line, Dadonov second line, and Stankoven-Bourque third line with Benn. None of this was appealing beyond Wyatt + Top Line at ownership, as SJ without Celebrini gives a boatload of minutes to Mikael Granlund, a perfectly reasonable defensive C.

• TB/MIN expensive pieces probably get blotted by the EDM sun, and NJ is not going to have any ownership heading into CAR on a B2B.

• That leaves us with a gluttonous middle to parse through, consisting of the aforementioned DAL players, FLA, CAR1, CGY PP1, and possibly NSH1 with team total and Josi’s projection being so high. I suspect that while none of this can be paired with EDM1, there will be more than enough mid-tier lineups to inflate ownership on all of these stacks to some degree.

• If not stacking into EDM, CBJ or DAL, I don’t think there were any spots to worry about combinatorically between the rest of the slate.

What I Played

We’ll see how all of those thoughts hold up. With a single bullet, I played around with several lineups in the AM and tested some thoughts throughout the afternoon, but here’s where I wound up:

• I simply can’t believe the Calgary Flames are -160 against anyone. No way, no how. That should never happen again, this season. This is a team that has been actively dismantling the roster for over a year now, and arguably made their biggest two moves to signal their direction this summer, in shipping off a perfectly useful Andrew Mangiapane and Jacob Markstrom in separate transactions. They started 3-0 as a result of three gifts presented by the ferocious goaltending trio of Silovs, Fedotov, and Pickard. Better yet, they’re playing with pace, in the upper-half of the league in shot attempts for and against. There’s some fun possibility in their games, and with CHI1 nuking against Edmonton and then getting cheaper, I was incredibly enticed to roll Mrazek with the full thing. Seth Jones at $5.9k and Nick Foligno at $3k weren’t my idea of a good time, and I tested some 2v2s (mostly around the Gostisbehere/Raddysh at D theory), but the one-offs up there weren’t the most appealing to me and I felt overstacking on this slate made a lot of sense, as pricing was relatively efficient compared to the prior week of action with several top-tier studs being priced below $4k.

• PHI1 was finally put together the way I had envisioned, and what better way to benefit from the Good Play Oilers getting there (in a sense) than to play the perfectly PP1 correlated PHI1 for $14.6k. This line features one of the most dominant fantasy players of last year in Tippett, a second-half riser in Frost who has a prospect profile very similar to that of a Robert Thomas (..better. it was better), and my mega-super-smash-crush of the offseason in Matvei Michkov, who I’ve gone on and on and on about in this space and on the podcast in recent months. A game stack was certainly in order, here, but I frankly don’t love attacking Philly with chalk at high prices, and it would have cost me multiple pieces to execute a McDrai.

• What this build allowed me to do was to one-off Roman Josi, who was almost certainly going to be among the top-three owned defensemen because he was certainly the highest projected one. With my build I felt as if I had zero reason to differentiate. A classic 4-3-1 with maybe the best one-off play, I’ll take it. Roman Josi ferociously got there on Saturday despite his team being shut out, with 9 shots and 4 blocks for a whopping 24.7 on DK, and has outrageously expensive PP1 mates. One-off? Check.

There was a real chance I was going to look back on the slate and be a loser, as we simply hadn’t seen it from Philly and the other side of the CGY game had a much better total at lower prices, but I fundamentally believe in these first few weeks of the season the field knows next to nothing, particularly about the ascendant young players in the league like Connor Bedard and Matvei Michkov. Getting solid values surrounding those players based on historical production felt good enough to work for a GPP as top-heavy as the $360, which offered 33% of the entire prize pool to first place in a field of 925.

At the end of the day, I wanted to go down with my ship, and not abandon my takes after a week of hockey (which already featured a CHI1 takedown on Saturday and some mesmerizing Michkov runs of play, if not fantasy production).

Slate Retrospective: How did the field play?

Here’s the contest for anyone interested: DraftKings - NHL $300K Spin-O-Rama [$100K to 1st]

Badly, as always… but in reality, I had this sentence pre-written to focus on CGY chalk, and that simply did not occur. Actually, $7.1k Mrazek was the most popular goalie on the night, and while Zary was 13%, Huberdeau was 8%, Weegar was 8%, and Kadri was 11%, chalk did not concentrate around Kadri-Weegar like I had suspected. It just sort of spread around and meant that 8 players were at least 4.5% owned, as many as Dallas had! While I still don’t like that for the field, these players of course offer some upside and floor combo that I can’t ignore completely.

I still feel good about CHI1 at ~10% ownership, Seth at a measly 4%, and Mrazek. While 54/925 played the full CHI1 (6%), just 21 of those tacked on Seth Jones, and only 4 played Mrazek alongside it. No matter how I filled out the rest of my roster spots (4 in total), I was all set if Chicago did well because of how critical these players are to the team’s success. More on that in a moment…

Darren Raddysh is the player I most wanted to jam in (I even considered a one-for-one Foligno replacement, as I had the $100 needed, and playing 3D), as the TOI hadn’t been there with an 11-7 set up for the Lightning, but the PP1 job was steady and Eyssimont back in the fold meant we were pretty obviously getting a more standard 6D lineup, where Raddysh accumulates points at a perfectly fine clip per minute and had the PP1 upside that no other D has, with how he’s placed there to be a one-timer threat. $3.1k was a steal, and to see him at 4% in this contest vs. 23% for Gostisbehere (instead of 15-10 or so) felt bad. Gostisbehere was also a good play, no qualms here with his SOG bonus and goal performance, as annoying as it might be.

Kucherov came in a touch higher than I expected, at 14%, but with Kaprizov at 9% and all of the secondary pieces on both teams <10%, this still left room for McDavid to comfortably be the most owned stud on the slate.

McDavid was, at 22%, not as popular as I suspected, and that carried through to Draisaitl (13%), with the secondary Hyman-Bouchard pieces still coming in at 8-9%. With multiple tickets I surely would have built a PHI-EDM game stack through the PPs, as the pricing worked out just fine, and the results would have probably been.. fine, but nothing special.

On the other side of EDM, I wasn’t surprised that PHI was 7-5-5% owned, but a $4k Michkov remains a gift. He was in play up to 25% owned, easily, for what I believe in his skillset, usage, and linemates and how that translates to fantasy range of outcomes.

The most common three-man stack in the contest appeared to be FLA2 (58/625), Bennett with Verhaeghe and Rodrigues. I discussed this on the Morning Skate Podcast, and sort of felt that this situation was best addressed by a one-off, given the “donkey chucker” nature of the trio and the 11/7 setup likely meaning guys float around the lineup for Florida. This did occur, as ERod lost his role early in the 2nd, though I should note that FLA also did not receive a single PP after this point in the game, so his connection to the stack was completely severed beyond what I was suggesting. Ultimately, Samson was the guy you needed (duh), and with 21 minutes and all sorts of linemates, I’m a little peeved I didn’t find a Reinhart-Raddysh (or Gost) over Josi-Foligno 2v2 for a similar price. I probably keep Josi-Foligno anyway (I am much like the Leafs front office, and kind of like Nick Foligno), but not seeing the full range of Florida one-offs in this matchup and context is something I’m not thrilled with, and Samson rightfully punished me.

If there’s something else you noticed on the Tuesday slate, I invite you to hop in the MSP Discord (DM me on Xwitter if you need a link!) and post your thoughts, I’m happy to chime in. But I don’t want to keep you reading, forever, either.

Results:

I netted $790 on $430 in entry fees, the bulk of which of course was the $360 min cash, but had the late hammer running through a low scoring slate. It was a fun sweat, albeit a very painful one.

Chicago trailed throughout, while Philly got a quick 2-0 lead on the back of two Frost-to-Michkov PPGs in the nightcap. CHI mustered up 3.4 xGs, per HV, but Foligno was the only goal scorer and Seth Jones got stuck on 4 SOG and 2 BS for the entirety of the third. Losing that game, the way they played, felt like mega run-bad. Calgary had nothing doing, and I’m further incentivized to continue stacking against them for the foreseeable future. It is especially painful to lose both my Mrazek DFS score and my CHI ML bet to Matthew Coronato, a long-time friend of the MSP (who never, ever did this when I played him for a month last year!), picking up two goals, including the backbreaker of an empty netter.

With CHI closed out and PHI off to a hot start, I entered the third period with a sweat to break into the min cash bubble, and due to the low scoring nature of the slate (my team was only 34 points behind the leader when it was all said and done!), a couple PHI1 goals was easily enough to break into the top ten of the contest. It was not meant to be, although Tippett and Michkov picking up shots bonuses in the third period solidified some return on the night, for which I am appreciative.

It didn’t all come together, but I had a plan, executed it the way I wanted to, and left with slightly more money than I entered the slate with. And I have this cool newsletter, too!

What Won:

Goalie goal! Yes, Filip Gustavsson scored a goal, and it won HebrewCheetah $100k. That rocks.

First place was able to overcome a total of 5.8 from the D position, despite Gostisbehere smashing at ~20% owned. I don’t understand adding Boqvist (in 11-7) to a EV stack, as Lundell was not projected to be PP1, and certainly would have moved down to Gostisbehere to prioritize Tippett. Boqvist was far too expensive to roster as a speculative play. Alas, HebrewCheetah won anyway, thanks to Reinhart’s eruption and Lundell’s multi-point effort, along with hitting the nuts goalie and the disappointing-yet-GPP-winning Stars stack.

Philly was a common theme on all top three teams, led by Michkov. I tried to warn you. He’s an absolute rockstar, already. Tippett and Frost did enough to help, but not enough to be necessary.

I’m a little miffed by the Kyrou one-off in nhw’s lineup, with the lineup uncertainty I wasn’t overly worried about DAL stacks being correctly built and JRob is clearly the impact player there for $100 less in a far better spot. It even adds some correlation to the Walman play, with a PP-riddled game helping both players immensely to access their upper-end outcomes. The result would have been exactly the same, but whatever. Maybe nhw is a Kyrou Guy, I respect it.

Similarly, if I am AJ, in retrospect I am trying to get to Bouchard if targeting a full PHI PP stack and I created space for two alpha defensemen. Werenski scored the same, anyway, so I’m nitpicking. Miro played independently of any other Stars feels strange, and with an abundance of options like Seth Jones for a similar price that have much greater peripheral upside, I prefer stacking Miro when I do play him (which is rarely). Unfortunately, that low score from Miro might have been a $70k mistake with $300 to upgrade Miro. Had he gone to Shea Theodore though, correlating with his goalie, it’s drops him out of the top five, so certainly hit or miss there.

After a rough start to the year, it feels good to turn my ticket into some cash. I can’t say I’m upset, though finishing comfortably in the min cash range with where I sat the moment Michkov scored his second goal and CHI was pushing hard to tie their matchup might feel like a loss if I can’t follow this up with some more GPP sweats in the coming weeks, as first place was certainly in sights tonight with how low scores were across the board. Chicago pulling out a win in some fashion would likely have been immensely profitable, made all the more frustrating by my constant ragging on the Flames.

Hopefully you had a successful Tuesday, and if not we can reconvene on Wednesday evening and try to nail the Thursday slate, so don’t miss The Morning Skate Podcast! My co-host, DJ Mitchell, took down the Underdog main contest for a cool $2k on $10, which I’m sure we’ll discuss in great detail. I wonder where he gets his ideas.

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.