A Great Night to be from Buffalo

DraftKings ran a $303k total prize pool, $100k to first contest with a $360 buy-in on Tuesday evening. The contest was full by 9AM Tuesday morning. Oops. Embarrassment aside (they have to know how many satellite tickets are out there… right?), this was still a special day in the lobby, as $100k doesn’t come around often, and the other contests were juiced as well including a $25 FHWC qualifier.

I broke down the 8-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 when the NHL contests are at their largest.

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

In 2024-25, I reviewed:

MN Matt’s December $200k takedown in the $888: https://moods.beehiiv.com/p/2024-dec-888-abomnable-snowman

November’s $555 contest: https://moods.beehiiv.com/p/november-2024-barn-bash

October’s $360 contest: https://moods.beehiiv.com/p/2024-oct-spin-o-rama

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

• This slate was remarkably straight forward at first glance, as Tampa had a monster total, Chicago had a paltry total, and the other seven games were a 5.5 total. Tampa would be tremendously popular thanks to their odds in a 6.5 total, and the rest of the slate would be fighting for the scraps.

• Tampa was an interesting spot, as their lines were relatively uncertain as-of Monday’s podcast recording, meaning AM skate would tell us a lot about how the slate would unfold.

• Elsewhere, we weren’t watching any major news stories; NYI was without both Noah Dobson and Ryan Pulock (whose absences both appear to be long-term), WSH lines were a question mark (though I did nail WSH1 on the pod being Ovi-Strome-Wilson, which I did not see elsewhere in the industry), CGY was dealing with defensive injuries to Kevin Bahl and possibly others, and finally there were rumblings of Carolina going 11F 7D with Roslovic out.

• As you can see.. not a ton of news with consequence here, and all I could really drill down on was that every team having similar team totals (after Tampa)!

Tuesday’s relevant news:

• We started off with a banger, as Nikita Kucherov was banged up in AM skate and left the ice. He was later confirmed to be fine to play, but that counts as news on this slate.

• CGY switched up some lines, elevating Pelletier to the top line and making CGY3 Pospisil-Sharangovich-Kuzmenko.

• I truly don’t know if there was anything else to note. Carlo was trending out for BOS in addition to Hampus and McAvoy, we had some 3rd pair D rotation with Tyson Barrie and Perunovich drawing in for their respective teams, and Vegas confirmed that they would stick with Eichel between Barbashev and Stone. A slow news day, indeed. Let’s just get into what I played to talk a bit more through the slate itself.

• At lock, we got Vasilevskiy ruled out to illness, leaving Jonas Johansson to start. I did play a TB1 with CHI cheap shit as a result of this… just in case.

What I Played

I had earned ten tickets to the Spin throughout the past several weeks, so I went with ten teams in the $360, the $20, the $40, the $5, and the FHWC. I also max-entered the smaller spin (paying for 9 entries, leaving out one poor squad of mine) and played a couple contests with a “main” team of those ten builds:

Prior to the New Year, my play in these contests this season had been limited by a bankroll that was adamant on reaching $0. Since the New Year, I’ve had some success that affords me the ability to try and push things a bit more and build up a stash of satellite tickets. With that in mind, I hand-built the ten teams shown by sketching out the handful of stacks I wanted access to (I settled on 8 in total) and mix-and-matching them across lineups on a notepad. With that blueprint I went in to actually build the lineups around 6:30PM.

• I talked pretty extensively about the Sabres on the pod, and I was not going to miss an opportunity to jump on what I thought was an underpriced BUF1 that has been playing very well mixed with my favorite play of the night in Rasmus Dahlin, who I went out on a limb and used alongside Mason McTavish as a Guaranteed Goal (oops). Boston has been extremely poor defensively and was without McAvoy and Hampus Lindholm, relying upon Jeremy Swayman to bail them out. Tage has been trending very positively, Kulich looked like one of the better values on the slate (11 xFP/GP over last ten thanks to 5+ shot attempts per night), and Peterka/Dahlin made sense too. With Pasta looking pretty chalky, Buffalo was my primary stack that I tried to get several combos of.

• Anaheim was second, with another ~$4k center in Mason McTavish looking like a screaming value with a newfound PP1 role, recent production, and a matchup with a back-to-back Seattle team starting Phillip Grubauer. I was mostly trying to fit in Jackson LaCombe with him (I’ve capitulated to the Honey Hive of LaCombe truthers, but he still sucks at hockey), but with salary available in either direction was comfortable turning ANA builds into a Cutter-Fabbri stack or mixing in a Terry or Vatrano (but I was pretty certain I didn’t want to play both/Strome for ownership concerns).

• I wanted to target MTL-WPG, and actually completely whiffed on this spot, as I saw that Matheson skated with Guhle in practice yesterday, but he also skated with Hutson too. I failed to check back in this AM and did not see that the Hutson-Matheson pairing I loved so much had gone missing. I haven’t yet actually looked into the pairings that were created thanks to this, but the main appeal of mine was the idea that Hutson-Matheson minutes are full of chances. I defaulted to MTL2 with Hutson (which was a play regardless of d-pairings) primarily because Kirby Dach was $2.7k, which I really liked when I noticed that Pezetta was back in the lineup, who would not play any meaningful minutes. WPG2 was who I thought might get the Hutson-Matheson matchup with Guhle-Carrier eating a shutdown role in recent weeks, and with Tage/Dahlin as such a substantial part of my plan I felt like I needed some value lines, anyway.

• Elsewhere at the high-end, I wanted to play CAR1, NYR1, and TB with Seth Jones specifically. CAR1 and NYR1 are self-explanatory, as the xG index for the BOS-BUF, ANA-SEA, and CAR-NYR games were the three best marks on the slate, and I didn’t feel ownership was significant enough in any spot other than BOS1 to get me away from just playing what I felt were the top pieces from each game.

• The TB squad turned a bit funky with the Johansson news, as rather than just take a one-off CHI guy, I felt obligated to grab some CHI punts and throw my hat in the ring on Tampa roulette. That top line was so expensive that there were going to be very few lines that actually fit with it (see CGY ownership, below), so this new news gave me confidence that if I just played Seth Jones with… literally whatever on Chicago, I was giving myself an out to pick off the proper game script for a TB1 4-5 goal game with shot volume. Reichel and Nazar fit the bill, as did Alec Martinez as Seth’s d partner and BS magnet, so in a 5-4 game or something like that, sure I didn’t have Bedard but you weren’t fitting Bedard in with TB1 without sacrificing Seth Jones, who I thought was clearly the best Hawk for value.

• Since I was fairly confident in WSH1 being the three best players, with two usable defenders and fully PP correlated, they were a team I wanted to mix in as well. Since there was lineup uncertainty, I opted to play them with ANA on one build for flexibility if I had to make correlation changes and Weegar on another, so that I could double stack JC74 and Chychrun with Ovi if the lines did not break how I was expecting. It ended up working out to be Ovi-Strome-Wilson, so I didn’t change anything.

• Obviously, a sketchbook lineup has to be built, so some of the lineups were tweaked a bit to work or scrapped entirely. I am generally happy with my lineup set, minus the miss on MTL D info which may have shoveled me into some cheaper DAL stuff rather than Ehlers, as I was very confused by Eichel’s projected ownership relative to the Stars and felt like that would offer some leverage.

• I looked at COL stuff, but decided not to go in on them at reasonable ownership (15% or so projected) when they are literally the league’s fifth worst team at generating xGF/60 over the last 25 games. I also nah-waved BOS for ownership reasons, and generally just haven’t played CGY2 even though I am a long-term buyer of Matt Coronato stock.

Results:

Pretty decent, all things considered. I made some money in the smaller Spin and lost in the big Spin (the former having a far better prize structure, funny enough, with 20% to first rather than ~33% in the big Spin) thanks to Tage’s nuke (which I had 40% of to the field’s 10%). Dahlin kept me from competing, as did a failure to hit on any of my other mid-to-high end stacks. I entered my best team in some additional contests, including making a run at the $222 5-max with $10k up top, so I certainly ran good with contest selection but was going to roughly break even or profit slightly even without that main team picking up a few extra contests’ worth of scores.

Mason McTavish and Jackson LaCombe were a fun night sweat to have, protecting me a bit from the PMR that was chasing from behing in all contests with solid fantasy nights.

I said three things in the Discord today that I felt were particularly slate-relevant (I said a lot of things, and if you’re really reading this lengthy post I suspect the Discord might be a good place for you to hang out, you sick fuck) and feel like I went 3/3 on these key slate reads:

1. Igor/Dostal were not good, Igor especially (Rantanen adds a level of efficiency we’ve never seen in Carolina, I would target them with extreme caution), and these two ate up FORTY PERCENT ownership. We’ll mention this again below, but with goalie being so volatile, in top-heavy contests it is always worth fading chalk in net. Clearly Montembault and Wolf weren’t great, either, but Soderblom was the best goalie of the night at minimal ownership, and Sorokin was 100 less than Dostal, 200 less than Igor, and 100 more than Wolf, so he qualifies and these four goalies still added up to half of the Igor/Dostal ownership. I wound up heaviest on Sorokin, personally, once I realized I was in on the COL fade, but you can see I utilized several goalies, just one of which was Dostal and no Igor to try and spin the roulette wheel in net.

2. Buffalo did come in higher owned than projected, likely at the expense of Colorado. Of course I can’t prove exactly what went where, but that felt right when I said it and I still stand by that sense. I had my reasons for them being a top play, and I’m glad I stuck to my guns even though the field clearly agreed to an extent.

3. Pasta was slightly more owned than MacKinnon, but in general I thought that both were pretty thin. MacKinnon against the tattered NYI blueline was more intriguing, but pricing was tough to work, while Pasta was easier to stack but those stacking options were not good values even at lower prices, as no one has sustained production despite Pastrnak being the league’s best fantasy asset over the past several weeks:

   

   last 20 games fantasy point leaders, only Forsberg edges out Pastrnak in the NHL

What Won:

Buffalo won! Eat all of the dicks, Mahomes family. Only people from Buffalo get to call Buffalo a loser town.

The final minutes of the slate were especially painful for both the second and third place finishers, as mkberg12 (noted Discord member and 2023-24 MSP Special Guest Mike Berg!) had a strong grasp on the lead after the 7PM games finished, holding the WPG1 BUF1 combination mixed with two punt D that struck gold and nailing Soderblom. It was going to take something special to pass him. {dramatic, somber, foreshadowing music}

908Connor had the requisite BUF1 stack, capturing both hat tricks, with another nails goalie in Logan Thompson late. Connor had Brock Nelson and TDA, plus ANA1 with McTavish replacing Strome and tacking on LaCombe to make a PP1 stack. McTavish’s awesome performance plus Vatrano’s empty-netter to close did just enough to nudge him ahead of Mike, which was a particularly brutal swing from $100k to just $30k with the top-heavy nature of this contest.

But while the personal run out for Mike was painful, that pales in comparison to the 908Connor pain, as dbazzell23 made a very, very, late charge toward the top by capturing the THIRD hat trick of the night in Wyatt Johnston on the final play of the slate, in Overtime. BUF1 + DAL1 + Harley was enough to get it done, also with Logan Thompson, Darren Raddysh stinker aside. Harley picked up three blocks in the final 6 minutes of regulation to total four, which dbazzell needed every single stat to cap off the charge toward first. That final Johnston goal was worth 19, between the goal, the shot, the shot bonus, 3-pt bonus, and the hat trick bonus. dbazzell rose the leaderboard very quickly in the final minutes of Tuesday’s slate, is what I am trying to say. I think the final block from Harley was even a late stat correction, meaning 908Connor lost his title well after the hockey was finished. Ouch.

All three top lineups were perfectly well constructed, without the nonsense builds that sometimes infiltrate the top of the leaderboards on these marquee slates. It felt like 908Connor could have dodged ownership a bit better, but an assortment of 10%-ish owned players in a <1k person contest is very unlikely to lead you into a dupe train or a 2v2 party, particularly on a night where so much of the field is building around Nikita Kucherov.

Shout out to Mike for holding on to the ticket in the $25 FHWC Qualifier, so it was not all negative on Tuesday night!

Field Analysis:

• I am very sad that the Contest Dashboard no longer seems to be operational. Very disappointing, and makes this recap much more difficult from a field perspective. If anyone is familiar with a similar tool, paid or not, please reach out, I’m interested in checking that out. Otherwise, I may have to try and put something shitty together to replicate that dashboard.

• It was quite interesting that Nikita Kucherov was 40% owned on Tuesday, yet his perfectly correlated linemates in Point and Guentzel checked in at 12-13%. Kucherov as a one-off was a perfectly fine route to take, and it just didn’t work out for Tampa on Tuesday, but you gained all sorts of leverage by simply stacking TB1. The combinatorial ownership of {Insert the % of field who actually played all three here, if the dashboard were functional} on all three was definitely a way to differentiate from the masses, and so long as you avoided the clear and obvious CGY2 chalk, there were many choices on the cheaper end of things you could have considered. It didn’t work on this slate, and I discussed my reasoning for going CHI with that trio, but even the chalkiest player we have on the board can still be included without massive duplication concerns, which is a good reminder that you can absolutely play chalk on these slates, even if the top-heavy nature of the prize pools rewards leverage.

• I was a bit surprised to see COL/NYI total about 25% ownership between the top two lines, I wonder if the availability of NYI cheap defenders had anything to do with that, between Mayfield and DeAngelo both securing sizable roles for their cheap price tags thanks to the injuries. Otherwise, as I discussed on the pod and above, there was very little to like about the environment the Avs have created for themselves with a bottom five xGF/60 mark in the league over the last ~20 games.

• WPG1 caught a ton of steam relative to projected ownership, and I think that came at the expense of VGK1 in the 19-20k stack price range. Had I not seen the projected ownership, I would think that 5% Jack and 16% Scheifele was maybe a little strange, but it was tremendously odd to see the two project for the same ownership. Jack has been better, but the price discount still doesn’t reflect his season-long aversion to attempting shots. Certainly felt closer to correct that WPG was 3x the VGK ownership, especially considering Hutson at $3.4k made for a nice bring back in a game script that slanted towards power plays and/or offensive production.

• Top two players by ownership, by position? Scheifele (10 DK Pts), Sharangovich (0) || Kucherov (8), Coronato (6) || Darren Raddysh (4.3), Scott Mayfield (1.3) || Igor (1.4), Dostal (10.2). A tough night for the sort by ownership crowd.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Tuesday slate, and while I could have gone for more chaos in the news department, the very muddled nature of the team totals made it an exploitable slate where you could largely play the best plays the way you saw it, as there was only one spot to pay attention to, which we did in agonizing detail.

Rasmus Dahlin sunk my battleship as far as contention, but pulling back a solid profit on a night with the most at-stake so far this season is always going to leave me with that warm and fuzzy feeling.

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.

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