Burning The Midnight Oil

Stop me if you’ve heard this before but on a night with no NFL, one CFB game, no marquee CBB matchups, and an 8:30 NBA showdown, DK contests were largely filled by 4PM EST, with the flagship $555 filling at or around 5:45 EST, 1.25 hours before lock.

Close. Maybe next month!

Tuesday offered a $100k to first $555 contest, with 800 total entries. With ten games on the slate and not much else to partake in, it was a good day for the DFS NHL lobby with all sorts of interesting contests, including some nice ones on Underdog (that I did not participate in but wanted to shout out anyway!).

As a reminder, this is just a part of a series of these types of reviews: I reviewed the $222 contest from November here: https://moods.beehiiv.com/p/lightning-struck-nov-2025 and October’s massive season-opener here: https://moods.beehiiv.com/p/nhl-dfs-tilt-n-hurl-october-2025

two years ago threaded for your convenience here: https://x.com/FakeMoods/status/1853496293907161165

In 2024-25, I reviewed:

March $200K to first (!!): https://moods.beehiiv.com/p/a-barn-bash-at-the-donkey-palace

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

The rainbow chart showed Colorado, Minnesota, Utah, and Edmonton in the upper tier of the slate, and only Seattle, NYR, and Chicago in a lower tier. The rest clumped around a murky middle, most of which skewed positively (green) by xGs, which I theorize is thanks to the ridiculous scheduling. With most teams constantly playing 3 in 4 nights and 4-in-6es, practice time goes out the window, injuries ramp up, and the talent plays more than the coaching can with new bodies and tired legs.

You can read more about the rainbow chart here.

This iteration of the Morning Skate Podcast was a tough one. I thought I would be home on Monday evening with plenty of time to prepare for the podcast, but a severely delayed baggage carousel experience led to me racing in with limited prep and the show already live. Adding to the excitement was the fact that I had taken the weekend completely off of the NHL, spending time in Nashville with my dad and sisters for my dad’s birthday. A fun weekend, yes, but not one filled with much hockey (though I did catch the two Sabres wins in Vancouver and Seattle! I’m sure that three game winning streak kept the GM’s job… right?) and it left me playing catch up on the slate. Here are some of the most relevant notes I had for Tuesday’s slate, in no particular order.

• Anaheim was at the Rangers on Monday, and both teams had another game on Tuesday. CBJ, against the Ducks, profiled to be a popular spot on Tuesday evening, as discussed on the pod, but we weren’t fully aware of just how chalky CBJ would be projected at (and come in at, spoiler alert). The Rangers hosted the Canucks on Tuesday, and while they didn’t look all that great or anything, still held a 3.0 total (0.8 back of Colorado, the highest of the night) and were heavy favorites with Mika Zibanejad re-joining the lineup. Additionally, both teams used their star starting goalies on Monday, leaving the backup for Tuesday.

• Not only was Colorado the highest team total of the night, but Edmonton was second and Toronto third, against PIT and CHI respectively. With COL @ SEA, there was a legitimate conversation to be had about MacKinnon ($10200) vs. McDavid ($9700) vs. Matthews ($9200) at the center position, and these aggressive prices made it difficult to fit in multiple stud centermen. The stacks were also expensive, with TOR1 having Knies-Matthews-Nylander and EDM PP1 and COL having pretty obvious pairings of players at high salary.

• Minnesota took a swing over the weekend and landed Quinn Hughes, giving up several pieces off their roster in the process. At the same time, Edmonton and Pittsburgh swapped goalies, and Stuart Skinner was able to get his paperwork in order just in time to make his debut on national TV against the team he backstopped to two consecutive Cup Finals. What do we do with the new faces?

• Bedard, Malkin, Horvat, PKane, Will Smith, and Elias Pettersson were all out for their respective teams, and left PP1 and/or top six vacancies filled by very cheap players for one reason or another. We didn’t know if DK would add them all to the slate, but these pieces were worth considering regardless, if only to gauge the impact on the team as a whole.

What I Played

A bunch of nonsense.

Dangling unowned, unheralded, minimum salary PP1 players and/or top liners/top 4 defenders in my face on a night with incredibly aggressive pricing on studs in great matchups is basically begging me to lose. I took the bait and rolled out a true stars + scrubs team that we’ll get to below. But here’s some of the news that developed throughout Tuesday.

• NYI made Mathew Barzal a game-time decision thanks to what was deemed maintenance. For a team lacking Bo Horvat already, this was setting up to be a brutal spot, but also a gigantic minutes vacuum against a poor defensive DET squad, should Barzal sit.

• Similarly, Alexandre Carrier had already been moved up to the Lane Hutson pair, but then Mike Matheson, the MTL minutes-eater and defensive anchor, was ruled out for Tuesday’s matchup with the Flyers. Carrier vaulted into near-must-play territory for me, knowing I wanted to spend up at forward.

• Boston went with Pastrnak on a line with Morgan Geekie and Elias Lindholm, effectively loading up for this matchup with a Utah team that has been showing more signs of life lately in terms of pace, more closely resembling the team we expected coming into the season. With Pastrnak priced at just $8300, this was well worth consideration given how much more expensive the stud centers were.

• San Jose deployed Igor Chernyshov alongside Macklin Celebrini, choosing to leave SJ2 entirely PP1 correlated, and Detroit placed John Leonard in the Patrick Kane spot and JVR net-front on the PP1.

Knowing that CBJ1 would be ultra chalk made the decision rather binary - the rainbow sheet wasn’t all too in on the CBJ action, with literally a dozen good spots it would take a true Herculean effort for the Jackets to put me away on this slate. I was poking around ownerships and I felt as if MIN would be coming in around their 5% projections, and while I wanted to play Quinn Hughes with it, coming out with the fully correlated MIN1 + Hughes-Faber, with how injured MIN was it felt like the stack of forwards was the play, using the numerous defensemen punts that I was considering to afford it.

McDavid vs. Matthews was difficult, and MacKinnon with MIN1 was actually impossible to play unless you used four 2.5k guys, instead of having a little bit of money to spread around. I sided with Matthews mostly because I felt pretty good about betting on the environment with Nick Lardis, a nice-looking prospect who played 16 minutes in his first game with PP time and a sterling prospect profile. Penalties being a correlated bet within the same game makes game-stacking in any form a key tiebreaker of mine, and this situation felt particularly worthwhile to lock in Matthews as a one-off with the Lardis PP1 bringback and hope the refs had a quick whistle here.

This left me still needing two punts at D, a goalie, and a W. Picking on Calgary is always a good decision, and while in retrospect I simply should have stacked Celebrini with Chernyshov, I feel fairly strongly that Macklin Celebrini’s real value to an NHL team is his playmaking. There’s no denying he’s an incredible player, but I don’t think he has the Connor Bedard-esque alpha streak of being the finisher, but rather the Crosby-esque I am going to make you the finisher aura about him. This is mostly informed by Toffoli and Will Smith alongside him having peak performances significantly more often than the linemates of MacKinnon, Bedard, and Matthews do, and could just be a skillset thing, but Chernyshov like Lardis has been very effective in the AHL this season, warranting the call-up, and Chernyshov even has experience in the KHL before he wrecked the OHL last season. That doesn’t seem fair! I thought it was incredibly likely that Chernyshov hit the ground running in a gift matchup at home against the Flames.

Locking in Carrier was almost always going to be my first move at defense, except for a few minutes where I toyed around with Quinn Hughes - Hutson/Dobson lineups to see what those textures looked like. I decided I did not like cheap C nearly enough to prioritize D, and Carrier is one of the better block rate defenders in the entire NHL, now on a blue line with no Matheson to take minutes and defensive responsibilities. He was a no-brainer if he fit my build, which he did to a T.

I had Gustavsson and Malinski in, Malinski being one of my favorite punt D in the league from a talent standpoint. Then I confirmed that Anaheim was continuing to scratch Drew Helleson and glommed on to the idea that last game against the Rangers the Ducks played Olen Zellweger and Ian Moore for 22 minutes on Monday. Combined. This gave LaCombe a massive role with Trouba, but it also forced Pavel Mintyukov and Radko Gudas to pick up 20 minutes with ease. With Mintyukov making the rainbow chart with strong performances of late at the dead minimum, when I realized the leverage that Husso would give me against chalk CBJ in a spot where I was fairly confident in a b2b the Ducks would bleed shots against (like they do in every circumstance anyway), this lineup felt pretty neat.

Results:

I lost. No surprise. I chose the wrong $9k+ center, I stacked a line that got cucked by Vladimir Tarasenko, and I played not one, not two, not three, but four punt garbage plays for the privilege. But other than that, Mr. Lincoln, how was the play?

I still feel as if MIN was a bit too cheap for the upside they had in this competitive matchup that profiled well for pace and the brand new circumstances with both Quinn Hughes on the team/PP1 to begin with, and the fact that with all of these injuries and traded players, MIN1 was going to have to be relied on even more heavily than normal. They were also the only team with two forwards in the top 15 by xFPPG, and Boldy (5th) and Kaprizov (9th) were even in the top 10.

I was expecting 5% and got 10% on MIN1, which is lightly annoying, but of the 8% of the field that stacked MIN1 fully, 50% of those also played Quinn Hughes and zero other entrants in this 800-player field played Auston Matthews with MIN1. The path was probably too thin for a 800-person contest given the uncorrelated cheap shit I had to hit to support the four studs, but these four were at least a ticket to victory. It just turns out that three other Cs, at least, priced at $7900 or above went for ~30-40, and Matthews only hit 15. MIN1 was ok, but Tarasenko-Yurov winning GPPs from the 2nd line feels like bad luck more than bad process.

Six of ten games went for 5 goals or under, and the other four went for 7, 8, 9, and 10 goals. EDM and COL winning the highest-scoring games is not really a surprise, those what was a surprise is how their opposition drive things, Seattle especially, who played a pretty great game all things considered. Pittsburgh was also only a little lucky to wind up with four goals, while the under games were mostly duds from an overall pace/xG standpoint.

What Won:

The late games decided a lot of this slate, with COL, SEA, and SJ offering pieces that made the podium on this slate. People who went to bed content were in shambles, and hopefully someone woke up to an unexpected victory as a result. Vladimir Tarasenko at $3.6k and just 3% owned was something of a win condition, as while there were several 30+ point scorers on this slate, the other four were $7.7k or higher.

I really dig the alpha D perspective of the winning lineup, as I am more likely than most to flip the build and play the expensive defensemen and leave the punt shit that the field loves to play alone. On this slate, however, I felt the punts were very strong and the ceiling from the forwards was worth chasing. Clearly, bkreider (or BK’s optimizer) felt differently, and if you sat down and said “what if the three $7k+ defensemen all have great games?”, this might be the sort of lineup you build. Cale Makar correlated with at least Gabriel Landeskog on the PP1, and probably Nelson too (which did turn out to be the case), with Nichushkin being a perfectly reasonable play with those three in the lineup. Zach Werenski correlated tremendously well with Adam Fantilli, and going back to my reasoning above, I felt the mid-tier at C was especially weak, so even though Fantilli was significantly owned, there weren’t the same glut of options that made me concerned with his ownership as I was for Marchenko and Voronkov at W. All were underpriced, but Fantilli seemed like the best one-off option or pair with Werenski. Quinn Hughes, of course, wouldn’t fit into this build, but Vladimir Tarasenko would, as the cheapest (by far) PP1 mate of Hughes. Mix in the final two spots being Tarasenko’s center, Yurov, and Gustavsson in net, and I would say these three stacks bring to light the idea of the best defensemen popping off on this slate. Well played from bkreider.

jpeters6 took second place with a slightly more haphazard lineup, relying on the McDavid-Hyman-Bouchard trio to do most of the heavy lifting while relying on Nelson-Nichushkin (with no Landeskog, strangely, who for $200 less was a better play than Nichushkin given the PP1 role) and three one-offs to get there. Tarasenko and Chandler Stephenson (!!) did enough of the work to enter the fray, though if Cam York adds anything to this lineup jpeters6 gets to ride McDavid to the winner’s circle. He’ll have to settle for $40k.

ArtfulPossum deployed a classic PP1 overstack against Calgary to great effect. I think Alexander Wennberg was an objectively bad play at 14% owned, but at least when you overstack the PP1 you can bet on him getting there via others, and Macklin Celebrini was a separator on Tuesday night, posting a slate-high 43.5. Closing out this build was a Boldy-Tarasenko mini-stack of the PP1 and Zach Werenski. Having the $100 and siding with Greaves over Gustavsson was a $80k decision, unfortunately. Goalies are the worst.

Field Analysis:

Thanks to ResultsDB for the immediate updates, I was able to play around with some thoughts as early as last night (with the 7PM games only) and the full slate today.

On that last topic, somehow 6.25% of the field played the full SJ2 line. I love picking on Calgary more than the next guy, but this level of ownership is outlandish. However, only ~30% of these SJ2 people added on Celebrini, which for reasons addressed earlier strikes me as the only way to play this sort of line well. Celebrini is going to create so much for these guys on the PP, and I don’t think they are getting there on 5v5 play alone.

15.7% of the field played CBJ1, and 7.0% of the field played COL2. More people played Werenski with COL2 than played Makar, which is actually psychotic opto-brain in action. The prices weren’t that different, and the projection was 2 points higher for Werenski for reasons beyond my understanding despite COL having the highest team total on the slate

The correlation effect should mean much more than a 2 point projection difference, IMO. Makar accrues DKPts at a better rate than Werenski, shown below, had a stronger xFPPG over the last ten than Werenski, and, oh yeah, plays on the same fucking team as COL2. If you fell into this trap and played Werenski over Makar on a COL2 build without very good reason, give yourself a whack upside the head and be better. Better yet… Be like bkreider, and just play both!

Among the elite stacks, basically every prime two-man stack was played between 7-10%, making the slate a true pick’em from that perspective. McDavid-Hyman, Matthews-Nylander, MacKinnon-Necas, Kaprizov-Boldy all fit this bill, and all were between 7-10% owned. I chose to play Kaprizov-Boldy, of course, and don’t feel too bad about it, but McDavid has been incredible lately and did offer up Evan Bouchard, who was cheaper than he usually is (and a good bit cheaper than Makar/Hughes) and is a key Moods Dude (in a way that Morgan Rielly isn’t). I perhaps should have come off my preconceived Punt-D bias and found a way to McDavid + Bouchard, but only 37% of EDM1 stackers did that. Some field stats on that angle:

• McDavid-Hyman (9% owned in the $555), 37% added Bouchard

• Matthews-Nylander (10%), 23% added Rielly

• Fantilli-Marchenko (22%), 67% added Werenski

• MacKinnon-Necas (7%), 33% added Makar

• Kaprizov-Boldy (8%), 51% added Hughes

Given the upside-relative-to-position these alpha defenders have, and how much cheaper they were than the Matthews-MacKinnon-McDavid tier as far as one-offs are concerned, I probably should have prioritized an alpha defenseman with my stack, though if Matthews gets 6 shots and adds the empty netter, that 15 turns into a 40 real quick, and that covers for a lot of poor punts.

A special shoutout to the three users who couldn’t figure out that COL2 with CBJ1+Werenski+LaCombe and Gustavsson in goal would be duplicated. This includes friend of the pod AJ, who played this lineup twice? It cashes easily, of course.

Another losing night on Tuesday, which is the status quo around these parts, but we’ll be back at it on Wednesday night live and Thursday on the pod feed for the Morning Skate Podcast and here again on Friday for the Moodsletter DFS Slate Preview of Friday’s 5-game slate.

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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