Big Score on Scoring Line Special Night

We are back! Each month (or so), DraftKings posts an NHL GPP that is far larger than the days around it, typically on Tuesdays in concert with the largest slates of games. Each month, I faithfully review my play in the contest and discuss takeaways and strategy for these contests, and for the game in general.

For previous versions of this review, see my posts from December, November, and October and subscribe to the newsletter so you don’t miss out on future posts!

As part of all of these “flagship” slates, I have a podcast that I would suggest you subscribe to if you had the curiosity to click on this link, as it will be right up your alley. If you haven’t listened to Tuesday’s pod and are reading this, I’m likely going to make casual references to the thoughts I shared within the podcast, so it may even be worth your time to listen to this one after it’s no longer relevant to the slate, if only to connect what I’m saying there with how I’m explaining my decisions closer to DFS lock. I spend about an hour with regular co-host DJ Mitchell going game-by-game through the slate, talking about all the little bits and pieces of news we have the day before a game, and mentioning what to keep an eye on the following day. In addition to news, we’ll of course cover where I’m looking to stack teams, where to find values, etc. as a full strategy show.

I played only one lineup on Tuesday night (and have been playing one lineup, at lower volume, for the past month or so as I try to find my footing while all my friends get big wins) and was fortunate enough to have a $432 FHWC Q ticket that I turned into a seat in a 68-man field despite finishing only 48th out of 1,001 in the $111.

Today’s Primary Point: Breaking Down My Approach to the Slate

So.. yeah, got pretty lucky that the FHWC seat win overlapped with this flagship slate breakdown, huh? We’ll cover the slate dynamics, then I’ll talk a bit about just how effin lucky I was to have had the night I did.

To start, a quick summary of the major news we knew and were looking for as lock approached on Tuesday (some of this was discussed on our podcast, other news became relevant on Tuesday):

• Kyle Connor BACK, Gabe Vilardi GTD (coach said in, AM skate lines said not so fast, a true mystery)

• DAL coach said “there will be line shakeups” despite an optional AM skate.

• Alex Ovechkin GTD with LBI, AM skate indicated he would not play.

• OTT lines tweaked.

• SJ vs CHI in a true garbage bowl.

• TOR AM Skate rushes were necessary after their full blendering of fwd lines over the weekend

• Several B2B spots with much intrigue (and no AM skate) after the Monday holiday slate of games:

  • SEA without Dunn, Burakovsky, Beniers on Monday, Larsson ? for Tuesday with illness.

  • COL without Val Nichushkin played L1 over 26 minutes on Monday in a loss, coach hinted at “getting fresh bodies back” in Tues presser. Anything was possible heading into pregame warmups.

  • NYI after getting pasted by MIN limped into WPG with nothing guaranteed in their lineup.

  • LA ended their hellacious road trip in Dallas, coming off a win Monday against the Canes (first in 8 tries).

  • SJ and ANA also took the road to face similarly mediocre competition on a B2B (which is either being mean to WSH or nice to CHI, I’m not sure at this point).

The Sheet for Tuesday night, which I post in the Discord usually 60-90 mins pre-lock

So with all of that context above, I knew that COL would be chalky, especially because both Ross Colton and Jonathan Drouin were in premium roles at cheap price tags (both on PP1). Coach Jared Bednar dropped a quote in Tues AM availability that he was “expecting fresh bodies” back in the lineup, to me a clear indicator that 1) he realized COL1 usage was unsustainable, particularly on a B2B and 2) Artturi Lehkonen was possibly back (it wound up being Miles Wood who returned, who matters less to the “Top Six” forwards).

It became apparent that WSH1 would be massive chalk with how well TJ Oshie had performed in his three games back from injury and with how high Max Pacioretty’s projection made it around the industry. While clearly good values across the board, it was extremely obvious that some variant of COL PP1 and WSH1 (mixing in John Carlson with WSH1 and trading off Rantanen and Makar with Mack/Drouin/Colton) would be the overwhelming chalk of the night. Over 1% of the field (11 lineups) played a literal 3v3 in the $111 with this setup, which is something we joke about but rarely comes to pass at these extreme of levels, and 3 lineups in the $432 winner-take-all FHWC qualifier duped each other:

Just an absolute piss-poor effort by these DFS players all around in failing to set themselves up for a path to first place that didn’t involve being perfect.

My Strategy on Tuesday night is pretty complex to describe, but I had a relatively one-track mind the entire time leading up to lock. I was extremely intrigued by the availability of late news on WPG and DAL, home teams against B2B teams that had middling matchups on paper, but that my xG Index stats (from the screenshot above) pinpointed as good matchups when adjusted for the slate. I wanted to prepare for that situation.

In looking through my options, I was aware that WPG/DAL could both end up in not-ideal situations (namely, that I’d be stuck with a WPG1 stack that included Iafallo (who sucks) and forced salary-wise to DAL2 if DAL1 wound up being normal despite the warning of “line jumbling” from Pete DeBoer. Rather than lock myself into a sub-optimal WPG/DAL stack, I wanted to leave myself an out to get to EDM or TOR stacks (which I thought would be more split than they were, more on that below).

This left me wanting/needing to punt a position. The clear punts in the early window were LaCombe and Evans, both defensemen, or getting up to a $3.4k Ross Colton or $3k Kaapo Kakko. I got lucky in that both LaCombe and Evans were very popular: I was thinking hard about full line ANA1 but opted against it for no reason other than I wanted to leave a WPG/DAL team open (you can see ANA had the “best” matchup due to WSH’s piss poor xG numbers defensively). Leo Carlsson is undeniably special, and the prices on Terry and Killorn made up for Carlsson’s low floor profile at $5.1k.

LaCombe’s role and projection elevated his and his linemates’ ownership to levels I didn’t expect, thus why I felt lucky. I discussed my hesitation to play Colton without PP1 Colorado (betting on a line of LOC - Colton - Kiviranta to put the slate away on their own was pretty unlikely, and MacKinnon was so powerful that a Colton game probably meant Mack was getting a huge lead on me anyway. Ryker was a similarly good play, but I had no interest in the game environment for him or Kakko once I saw McTavish was starting the game after a mid-game demotion on Monday with Jakub Silfverberg being promoted to his wing (from the 4th line).

The Silfverberg play was incredibly unowned (I believe I was the only person in a 1,001 person field to play Silfverberg). He wound up not making much of a difference (though as you saw, every point technically mattered), posting 4.5 DKPts, but I feel obligated to walk through that decision given the alternatives:

Silfverberg is a long-time favorite of mine. Clearly, age has caught up to him and he’s lost a step. But, he has been playing on the PP2 (which I refer to as the PP1, because, you know, it’s used more and used first in every game since the Drysdale trade and Mintyukov’s subsequent injury, which is how PP1s are defined in every case except for this one, I guess — reminds me of projection systems undermining Patrick Kane’s role for years because of Toews being referred to as L1 for no reason other than “he’s the Captain”) and carries the team’s best shots/60 mark outside of Frank Vatrano (a $6k salary player).

That’s better than McTavish, Terry, and the rest of the gang on a per-minute basis. There’s also some long-term comfort I took in that he’s been used in EN situations before (though not as of late), but ultimately the mere fact that he was STARTING the game with McTavish had me very sure I was getting 13-14 Silfverberg minutes with PP1 time. Meaning, I was comfortable enough with that play that I could do absolutely anything I wanted with the late news and not spend one second worrying about my paths to first place.

I also played Justus Annunen in goal in the 7PM window. I felt that he was a good way to leverage the COL1 chalk while still benefiting from what I thought was an OTT team that would jump on the tired legs of Colorado. In retrospect, I probably should have left G open (it wound up the case that I could have played Oettinger or Hellebuyck somewhat easily), but with Annunen reaching the bonus and a W, I can’t say it was a total mistake, it just took a freak COL outcome (the depth contributing way more offense than I believed possible) to make it pay off.

Post-lock, I was sitting on Seth Jones, Nate Schmidt, and old DAL1 with WPG1 (sans Iafallo), as that fit salary-wise were I to get hit by a bus. I knew this was open to changes, and thus once we got confirmation of DAL and WPG lines (highlights: Wyatt Johnston replacing Pavelski on L1, Vilardi being IN and replacing Iafallo on a line with Connor and Lowry), I went to work.

The best way I had to align these players left me a few hundred short of what I wanted (which was a Seth Jones one-off with Robertson/Johnston, WPG1 + Morrissey), thus my goalie frustration. However, Seth down to Thomas Harley worked, and clearly correlated. The final consideration there was that I had a PP correlation regardless of whether DAL went to a 5-fwd PP1, as Johnston has been on PP2 all year regardless of configuration.

Results: I held off a late CGY2 push (second was 4v4 me, shockingly, with CGY2 vs. my Wyatt/Jrob/Silf, and Annunen vs. Mrazek), faded a Kadri OT winner from 3rd place (that OT assist by Kadri brought him to within 3.6 points), and survived TOR PP1 (Matthews/Marner/Rielly) from thepickler with EDM getting a late goal to prevent the game from going to OT. This contest was incredibly close, so there are several other plays (Jack AKA Packerbacker noted that a NYR goal was credited as unassisted that could have realistically had two assists vault him over me with those 10 DKPts) that could have ended my FHWC dreams.

What Won (besides me!): I did not come close whatsoever in the $111 to first place, settling in at 48th for a nice ~3.25x cash. Let’s quickly recap the $111 since that’s technically what I’m supposed to do here:

NYR1 taking on a banged up Seattle squad led the way, with Fox providing a separator score on defense and NYR1 doing more than enough (jaker1soe won the contest by 20 points despite the relatively low output from NYR!) when paired with OTT1 + the Devon Toews bring-back to the gamestack. OTT2 was a near-perfect stack, the only flaw being that all three were stuck on 4 SOG. Mrazek in goal was the highest score of the night, and was clearly more than enough to win.

Unsurprisingly, OTT2 was found in each of the top 8 lineups, Devon Toews or Girard in 3 more of those as a gamestack the other way, but none had quite the perfect mixture of separator D+G like the 50 points from Mrazek + Fox to go with the other configurations around OTT2 + another line.

Some other slate thoughts in reviewing the field’s play:

• TOR vs. EDM ownership baffles me. I was leaning EDM as well over TOR (though as I noted, DAL/WPG news worked out that I was happy to play both those teams in the mid-tier, rather than root around in punt-land to play Matthews/McDavid/both), but McDavid checking in at 17% to Matthews at 3.6% was shocking. Had I known that ownership level pre-slate, I may have been tempted to a Matthews build.

• ANA chalk coming via Jackson LaCombe at 15% and the nominal PP1 with Terry-Carlsson-Killorn (all of whom were 5%+ owned) probably should have been expected, which was a miss by me. I believed that WSH1, Evans, and Colton offered enough value to keep the field away generally, but I’m fortunate I veered away from ANA1, all things considered, as my read was not sound.

• CHI chalk was pretty obvious as the morning progressed, with Rem Pitlick once again leading the way at 12% owned. Absolutely egregious number for a player that never shoots. Literally, go check out Natural Stat Trick if you don’t believe me, sort by shots/60. The projections are lying to you. He was an OT deflection that was barely stopped away from jumping me in the FHWC contest, at which point I may have left this community forever and moved into the mountains.

• Seth Jones was unfortunate to not pay off his tag, also at 12% owned, with 10 shot attempts on the night turning into a whopping 4.3 DKPts. A better one-off play than a stacking partner, in my estimation.

Final Thought: Predicting late news and preparing for it is a constant in any DFS sport, but for some reason because it’s less frequently actionable than NBA, NHL DFS is referred to as a “set it and forget it” sport, very analogous to MLB. The problem is that MLB DFS involves one grand correlation (within-team) and nothing else (especially now that “batter gaps” are largely disproven as being meaningful, since RISP correlates much more weakly with fantasy production that sheer total at-bats), while NHL involves several mini-correlations, as far as 5v5 lines, PP units, and fringe roster scenarios like 11F 7D set-ups and F w/ D shared ice-time.

For this reason, I think last night was a great example of a night when I should win. It’s not because I’m the greatest NHL DFS player on earth, it’s because I am among the most thoughtful NHL DFS player in terms of considering how NHL teams deploy their players. That skillset includes an interest in, and being prepared for, changes to how these deployments are made. There’s no optimizer setting for Pete DeBoer telling us after an optional AM skate: “No lineup changes for tonight’s game vs. Los Angeles, but DeBoer said there will be some line juggling.”

Nobody, to my knowledge, is building simulations of how teams lineup configurations might look, to weigh the value of locking in great values in COL/WSH/etc. at the start of a slate vs. waiting to see what WPG/DAL configurations look like and sacrificing some projection for the unique correlations available that the field is not considering.

Those are the sorts of things that I am thinking about. Sometimes they lead me to getting buried, and sometimes they lead me to swerving around low-scoring chalk and grinding out a win that could very well save my entire season in one night (well, two nights, pending FHWC results).

In a game that is progressively more complex, edging closer and closer to being solved, keep in mind that this makes the field not only more powerful, but also more predictable. That’s the next evolution of DFS, primarily other sports first, but NHL included.

When you apply your skills (I call them soft skills on my end, but they don’t have to be for everyone else) on the margins, you might gain an edge. You might not. But what you will gain is a clear differentiation from the field as long as you’re aware of what that field is doing, what they’re monitoring, and how they are playing. It’s all about the path to first place, after all.

Those skills can be anything… they don’t have to overlap with mine, and my results from the past two years since the 2022 FHWC show there are clear deficiencies in my game that I need to clean up to continue playing at the stakes I would like to play at in the 2024 NHL DFS lobby.

But you can use my skills to your advantage by incorporating the Morning Skate Podcast (and our free Discord chat) into your daily process to hear my thoughts on virtually every NHL DFS slate before it plays out. In return, I receive instant feedback from sharp players, stress testing of my ideas, and even some new ideas and angles from an engaged community that I now consider internet friends.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back soon. Prep yourselves for February’s $555 contest, which has already confirmed to have a $1M prize pool and $200k to first place, with satellites already in the lobby. Happy Hunting.