A Barn Bash at the Donkey Palace

DraftKings put together an incredible contest with a $555 entry fee, paying out $700k in total, with $200k to 1st, $100k to 2nd, and $50k to 3rd. This contest nearly filled in mid-March with competition from the NBA (4-game slate) and all sorts of college basketball action. For a website that tends to underinvest in the sport, today was a good day for the NHL lobby, even if it does mark the unofficial end of the NHL DFS season (not including the FHWC for those with an entry!).

DJ was at a beer league game, so I was fortunate enough to have two incredible guests pop on the Morning Skate Podcast, in differing states of coherence, to get to the bottom of this slate. I suggest tuning in to that podcast in full for where my head was at prior to the slate’s start, if my specific approach is of interest to you.

I broke down the 11-game slate with the two most recent big winners on marquee slates in MN Matt (nolt0032) and mkberg12, 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:

January’s $360 contest, in which Mike got hawked down late for the $100k top prize (but don’t worry, he still shipped a FHWC seat with that lineup): https://moods.beehiiv.com/p/2025-jan-360-spin-o-rama

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:

I post this in the Morning Skate Podcast discord daily, with team-level trends, player production, and some slate-specific stats like projected ownership and Occupy Index courtesy of OccupyFantasy.com

• Aaron Ekblad was suspended on Monday for performance-enhancing drugs, while Matthew Tkachuk’s absence continues to create value up and down the lineup. In a soft matchup on the road with Boston and prices that did not reflect the current roles, particularly on the PP1, Florida was looking like a supreme option.

• New Jersey hosted the Columbus Blue Jackets in a game that had substantial playoff implications for both sides. With no Jack Hughes, no Dougie Hamilton, and Jonas Siegenthaler on the shelf for the year as well, value was abundant on the Devils as well.

• San Jose capped the triumvirate of what seemed like the highest-ownership spots on the slate, playing at home in the nightcap against the Predators. I didn’t see that one coming as-of the podcast, but an initial read of ownership in the morning showed a pretty clear lean toward SJ in that matchup, for reasons I’m still unclear on.

• Some other odds and ends that highlighted the podcast: VGK great matchup vs. PIT; unknown line combos || CAR no Svechnikov, no Orlov, rebuilt lines and PP units; in that same game Bjorkstrand minimum salary and PP1 for Tampa || no Laine for MTL against a Vancouver team still missing Quinn Hughes || LA icing the AK47s as a full L1 PP1 stack for just $16k against a bad NYI squad

Tuesday’s relevant news:

• Not a ton to speak of - Doughty was quickly ruled in after missing LA’s AM skate, while Brad Marchand was quickly ruled out after taking AM skate in Boston for the Panthers (that feels weird to write).

• PHI lines were largely as expected in the AM, taking on an Ottawa team that gave up FORTY-EIGHT shots the night before to Detroit (and winning, because hockey!). Vancouver shook up their lineup, and the Isles made no top six shakeups coming off a drubbing to the Ducks.

• We went into lock not being sure of lines for Tampa, Carolina, Nashville, Minnesota, and Colorado (though Avs were not expected to change much on a b2b), at the very least.

What I Played

With satellites in the lobby for nearly two months, I had been collecting tickets for a while, actually stopping at one point entering the contests thinking that my ~16 or so at the time was going to be enough to max (or nearly max) the contest. I was very wrong about that, and the past few weeks haven’t been kind to me anyway, so I ended up with 18 tickets to the $555, which I did not bolster with any paid entries. Rather than list out each lineup I built like I normally do, I will just highlight my key stacks/decision points.

• Nashville was my immediate first thought with how unbelievably good Forsberg has been, heading into a matchup with the Sharks where stacking him was rather unnecessary considering they were just coming off of an 11F 7D game where his center in Colton Sissons played 14 minutes to his 20. What made NSH even more appealing was that I was shocked to find Tuesday AM that the entire industry was projecting Brady Skjei for PP1, when a $3500 Nick Blankenburg took over the PP1 last time out. I used Blankenburg on 13 of 18 rosters, and Forsberg on 7 of 18, mixing in Marchessault (6), Sissons (3), and Stamkos (1) to complete my NSH stacks. In hindsight, I knew Marchessault was a thin play, and at $7K I probably should have moved some of that around to get better stacks with Nashville, but.. oh well. I wasn’t winning anyway, spoiler alert.

• I had a similar level of conviction on Winnipeg, but knew they’d be fairly popular as a top-line stack, so I chose to go that route instead of the mid-tier chalk route, as choosing both was getting me into a 3v3 fight with D and goalie. WPG1 has been amazing all year long, and picked up a great matchup with a struggling Rangers team that still has enough offensive juice to (sometimes) get into back and forth affairs. It was also nice that the Rangers offered up a PP1 defender in Zac Jones who at $3100 made for a clean way to get a game stack while not completely sabotaging the rest of the lineup. I mixed in Morrissey, sometimes in a 4-stack sometimes in place of Vilardi, and got one Namenstnikov-Ehlers-Connor stack for a total of five WPG teams.

• Philly and Columbus were two teams I felt very good about, and was quite confident they would come in with negligible ownership.

  • PHI2 (Michkov with Couturier and Tippett) was quite possibly my favorite stack of the night, with the recent departures of Kuzmenko and Laughton opening up a ton of minutes for the Flyers both at 5v5 and on the PP, and Ottawa limping into Philly off of a game where they allowed 48 shots to the Red Wings with their backup in goal. I’m not scared of John Tortorella, and have gone over why you shouldn’t be either a million times on X, on the podcast, and in Discord. At this point, if you’re not on the Michkov train get ready for it to fly out of the station, if it hasn’t already.

  • CBJ1 was much easier, with their prices and PP1 full correlation coming in handy. The only concern was matchup, but with no Dougie, Siegenthaler, and Jack Hughes, I’m more than happy to lean into it being a volatile spot. I hear volatility wins GPPs.

  • My portfolio of Tuesday teams was made up of builds that touched on at least one of stacking NSH, WPG, CBJ, and PHI.

• I filled out my stacks up and down the board with MTL1 (3x), LA1 (2x), CAR (2x, one Aho line, one Staal line), with a mixture of one-off Ducks and potshots on Bjorkstrand & Gourde as one-offs as-needed.

• As discussed, Blankenburg was my largest stand, but otherwise at D I made an effort to get some Noah Hanifin, Luke Hughes, and Noah Dobson in my lineups, the latter two also used as game-stack options with teams I was otherwise using in said lineup.

• There was late Vegas news, with Barbashev sitting and Olofsson moving up to L1, so I made sure to get an Eichel-Olofsson-Hanifin in there, because I guess Victor Olofsson is the only player who doesn’t immediately become 450x better a player upon leaving Buffalo.

• Post-Lock, we got news that Bjorkstrand was L3, not L2, and while reducing my Bjork shares slightly (I played 4 of him and 2 Gourdes, down from 7-8 plus a TB2 stack) I wound up getting more Scott Morrow for Carolina, a pretty good prospect out of the NCAA last year who is fast-tracked for the NHL next season and has been quite productive at the AHL level (~0.8 PPG and 2.5 shots per game). He showed up on the rainbow with decent xFP production in limited minutes so far in his career at the dead minimum. The team listed him with Chatfield in warmups in place of Orlov, so I thought there was a chance he even hit the 20 minute TOI mark and I could always fall back on the fact that he definitely has some pop to his game, which is all I can ask for out of a punt.

Results:

Not a good night. I turned 18 $555 entries into $2550 via the Barn Bash contest. I took enough Calculus courses in college (seven) to tell you that that’s not nearly enough return to qualify as a good night.

I took a bath, which feels very unfortunate when Nashville turned over at lower ownership than I was anticipating. Forsberg at 10% against San Jose vs. Pasta at 7% against the Florida Panthers feels absolutely psychotic, and pairing that with a PP1 Blankenburg for just $3500 that the field missed out on gave me what I feel like was a mega win. In this reality, however, it didn’t matter much, as Forsberg’s 24 matched Pasta, and Blankenburg’s 10.6 was more than good enough to keep me on pace, but the rest of the Preds added nothing and my teams around them didn’t bring much to the table.

Winnipeg failed in a 2-1 win, which happens, while CBJ scored three times against the Devils (but allowed 5) with just one coming from CBJ1. Take a moment though and appreciate just how ridiculous that one goal was. At 30 seconds, the overhead angle is preposterous. What a player Fantilli is, and the finish was nasty in true Marchenko fashion.

The Flyers also failed, losing 5-2 to Ottawa, but Michkov playing 22 minutes and Couturier 20 was much better than even my most optimistic projection, Couts especially. They had at least four awesome looks and just didn’t get there. I think Torts keeps this duo together, and maybe I should have lightened up on Tippett a touch with his role clearly just not being very strong, but I was OK with his upside at $6k. We’re still in full-on buy mode for Michkov, who continues his ferocious run of form and fantasy relevance.

My one sweat (if you can even call it that?) started with a Scott Morrow blocks bonus and 9.9 score in the early window, and was bolstered by the MTL1 explosion out of the gates. This left me on the cash line with 300+ PMR remaining, Dostal was picking up heavy shot volume early and NSH was just getting started.

It didn’t do much from there, but I could at least see the path. Even one empty-netter woulda been nice, with Suzuki missing one from long-range and Forsberg getting tripped on his bid for the empty net, either player getting a three-point bonus gets a touch more money back, Forsberg especially with how many NSH squads I had hanging out just outside the cash bubble.

What Won:

You may notice a theme here:

Aliaksei Protas, huh. The Gr8 Chase came to a halt on Tuesday evening, with Alex Ovechkin passing up a bid at coming within eight goals of Gretzky’s record to feed Protas for the empty-netter to get his hat trick. What an incredible moment that was, even if it obviously put the slate under lock and key, especially as someone who was very invested in Dostal last night. Both Hischier and Timo bonused for the Devils, so even though each had 1G 0A, the stack worked just fine thanks to their 11 SOG.

It’s certainly an odd happenstance that spots 1-3 are a 3v3 off of one another (4th was also a 3v3 of this build, but with a far chalkier closing duo in Vasi 12% and Seth Jones 29%), but it’s a good lesson in that even builds with 3% owned stacks can be chalky, because of how the NJ pricing + ownership worked within an optimizer anyone who was going out of their way to get a WSH2 share funneled nicely into the build.

I don’t have any particular issue with these three teams, but it perfectly illustrates the point that Matt made on MSP in discussing this exact tournament, where he said in high stakes a 10% line is usually 20 people (in a 200-man field), but this time a 10% line is 140 people (in a 1400-person contest), and nearly every combination will be covered. In fact, Matt, this one was covered three times!

Congrats to the three big winners, I hope that Protas jersey all three of you need to order comes in before Ovi breaks the goals record at the FHWC event, where DK is paying for the FHWC participants to see CHI @ WSH that Friday night.

Field Analysis:

This endeavor was made much tougher by the fact that, once again, ResultsDB is completely down, with the NHL last updated for the Sunday slate (that we are all reviewing on our own time, right?) and nothing for Tuesday (or Monday). With this being the second review that is completely hamstrung by this newfound lack of availability, I plan to spend time this summer putting something together that I can use to review ownership in a similar fashion, because this feels pretty pointless…

• I mentioned a few things already, namely that Blankenburg not being projected as PP1 was a total miss by the field and that Forsberg’s ownership barely eclipsing that of Pasta’s, considering the matchups, is borderline criminal.

• I put out my reasoning for steering away from NJ and FLA on Tuesday on the podcast, but it’s worth revisiting the fact that the field “plugged and played” both Panthers and Devils when key pieces of their offense went missing.

  • Seth Jones hit 29% owned, while Bennett - Samoskevich were 18% and 16% owned. Unless the matchup was pristine, I am not touching those situations at ownership when we simply do not know how well the team will respond to not having a key defender in Aaron Ekblad. It didn’t hurt that Boston has been playing better, and was coming off an impressive showing over the weekend shutting down the Lightning.

  • NJ leveled out in ownership, perhaps even with CBJ a bit, so that feels like a bigger miss on my part, though I did mix in some Luke Hughes anyway, and it’s not like you couldn’t overcome Timo and Hischier combining for 39.5 DKPts for $13.3k in salary. That ~3x outcome is just a smidge better than the 2.8x pace Forsberg & Blankenburg went on for half of my teams! They just happened to be in the winning lineups because of what the optimizers wanted to play WSH2 with.

• San Jose’s ownership was insane. I have earned my bonafides as a Nashville skeptic (where were you in the offseason, calling me mean names for saying Stamkos was a horrific fantasy pick at his ADP!), but this was not the spot for a 20% Macklin Celebrini. No spot is, in all honesty, but I guess I have my new MacKinnon fade for the next twenty years lined up. A 9% owned Klim Kostin is not sneaky, even when he’s a direct pivot off of a 37% owned Bjorkstrand, no matter how good you think Celebrini is. SJ2 picking up 7% ownership or so as well, it wasn’t that much more for Montreal. No thank you to terrible teams at significant ownership because of “pricing”.

• Jack Eichel was 10% owned and his new linemate Victor Olofsson was 4%. Paying attention to news pre-lock matters, even when it doesn’t work out. Olofsson is always a thin option, but has legitimate two-goal ceiling whenever he steps foot on the ice, doubly or triply so when he does so alongside Eichel and Stone.

• I suppose a good final point could be to touch on the Bjorkstrand stuff. 38% ownership is massive, but it isn’t often you face a situation like this where a legitimate NHL scorer is priced at $2500 on what is likely a top five PP1 in the NHL. That is what we had on Tuesday, and even based on the previous role in Seattle for the majority of the last ten games, Bjorkstrand’s xFPPG production was good enough to make him the 2nd best pt/$ option on the slate, only behind Yanni Gourde’s three games since joining Tampa (8.31 to 8.18), both of whom were minimum salary. That’s not a projection, of course, and when factoring in Bjorkstrand’s historical offensive proficiency and the PP1 job, it is incredibly easy to see why Bjorkstrand’s ownership got up to where it did. My final stance on this matter is that it probably didn’t matter, it just made Bjorkstrand an inflection point of the slate. I think it was very possible to win with Bjorkstrand scoring 0, especially if someone like Zach Werenski went crazy on the other side of the owned NJ pieces, and Bjorkstrand scoring 24 would have made scoring go much higher by the sheer force of his ownership. The only negative was the matchup, but Kucherov has blitzed Carolina before via efficiency, and at $2500 volume is hardly a concern for Bjork anyway. The post-lock news came in that Bjorkstrand was skating on L3, but in an 11F setup, which, similar to everything else I’ve said, I don’t think changed much about the decision to play or not play him. I wound up at 5/18 teams with Bjorkstrand, just playing him as a one-off where it made sense to do so. I came off a Hagel-Bjorkstrand stack and manuevered it around to become a MTL1 team, too, so I guess that news saved me at least that chunk of money that I was able to return.

In short, it absolutely sucks to feel like I blew another chance at changing my NHL DFS season to turn into a positive one, but I don’t feel like I played all that badly. A few NJ stacks might have felt nice, but I felt strong about the failed stacks in WPG and PHI and don’t feel as if those were mistakes, and I can confidently say I was never getting to WSH2 in any iteration of this slate. I deeply appreciate everyone following along with the newsletter all season, and look forward to pushing out more content in the weeks to come.

Next up, I will be posting my Zamboni Manifesto, a deep dive into the Underdog NHL Playoff Best Puck contest, informed by 100 sims of last year’s NHL playoffs to learn some more about roster construction, stack selection, and all the fun stuff that makes the Best Ball game so much fun to draft.

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.