NHL DFS Tilt-N-Hurl

The NHL season officially kicked off on Tuesday with the first flagship GPP of the season: the $400k prize pool, $100k to first, $360 Spin-O-Rama.

I will discuss the slate setup, what I played in my nine entries, how I fared, and what won, as well as giving some general slate thoughts and takeaways from reviewing the field’s play.

As a reminder, this is just a part of a series of these types of reviews: Several contest reviews are also on the newsletter, 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

This is usually where I put my “Rainbow chart” that summarizes the slate: since we don’t have requisite data to analyze anything that goes into the rainbow chart, all I have to say is that we did a full 75 minute preview on the Morning Skate Podcast feed, also on DJ’s YT channel. I’ll go through some key points in bullet form, but make sure you listen to that if you really want to know my perspective on the slate.

• Carolina went into San Jose, who profiles as the worst defensive team in the league and had ceded 11 goals against in their first two games of the season. With Jaccob Slavin out and low prices across the board, the Hurricanes offered all sorts of viable options at any price point.

• People were foaming at the mouth to play the Anaheim second line, with Beckett Sennecke specifically being at least $1500 underpriced for what he’s shown in limited action mixed with his prospect pedigree. This entire line is sick, we’re all trying to find the guy who steamed this.

  
  

  Three top-five NHL picks, all under the age of 24? You’re speaking my language!

• With sufficient value and mid-tier plays, Toronto and Edmonton loomed largest at the high end: Toronto had the highest team total on the slate and yet another prospect value in Easton Cowan on the top line, while Edmonton had McDrai lined up together once again. Kucherov, Ovi, and Kaprizov also were on the slate, but none projected as high-enough owned to warrant a very thoughtful approach to deploying them.

• Some other odds and ends that highlighted the podcast: VGK taking on CGY was likely to have different lines than the field was expecting (Stone/Marner/Saad switching lines, in that order from 1→3) || NSH1 on the other end of the Leafs game, on a b2b with Cayden Primeau opposing them and lines that were.. fake(?).. as I outlined on the pod lining them up for PP1 perfect correlation || Dallas hosting a traveling, b2b Wild squad with their grab-bag of a lineup || PLD injury creating value in Washington, with both Connor McMichael (L2 C) and Anthony Beauvillier (L1 W) ascending into the top six and Sonny Milano working in to the PP1.

Tuesday’s relevant news:

• Limited changes thanks to b2b situations. Brady Martin was scratched despite also being scratched on Monday, the recent #5 pick being from Waterloo (Toronto being the closest NHL barn), which was a surprise but ultimately didn’t really change my thoughts on NSH/NSH1 correlation between Stamkos and Forsberg.

• Jack Roslovic suited up for Edmonton after signing last week. He was confirmed to be on L2 in AM skate, with Mangiapane elevated to L1 with McDrai and Frederic to L3 C.

• We had no firm word on Vegas at lock, while Kris Letang was likely in, as was Tristan Jarry. With MIN on a back-to-back, we were on alert for changes but nothing transpired there or anywhere else in the late window.

What I Played

I had collected nine tickets into the $360 over the course of the past ~month, and since I didn’t hit anything with my $4444 NFL ticket this past weekend (missing by 8 points with Tua dudding despite all four of the other Dolphins I played being fine to elite… cool), I stopped it at those entries and mixed in a couple bets and late slate entries.

• The key decision points as I saw them were Toronto, Carolina, and Edmonton. Toronto and Carolina because they were going to be quite popular, and Edmonton because I frankly don’t think McDrai is given enough credit when they are glued at the hip for 60 minutes as they were in this one, rather than just on the PP1 (foreshadowing alert…).

• If I was going to get an ownership discount on the Oilers thanks to the lore of Igor (who checked in at a whopping 20%) and/or the team total being a goal lower, I was going to take it, as EDM had one line to dominate the goals while Toronto has two. Team totals are cool, but I’ll take the monopoly. That led me to 5/9 teams with McDavid, four of which were stacked with Draisaitl and Bouchard.

• I opted out of any Toronto exposure, as I didn’t trust Cowan’s role and preferred McDavid straight up to Matthews and Rantanen to Nylander. I played a couple Annunens to bolster this take, setting me up for a high leverage TOR fade.

• Carolina I just didn’t care much about, with a handful of spots that I felt pretty confident in, I determined I would let Carolina forwards beat me. On every team, I considered a Carolina defender, specifically Gostisbehere and Walker for me, with a clear preference for Gost because the only thing missing from his profile is TOI, and I believed it would come with no Slavin and he and Nikishin looking so comfortable together in the early going. I landed on 1 share of Walker and 1 of Gost, ultimately, with a late swap getting me to a Stankoven last-man-in flex.

• I was never not playing ANA2, and on teams that I was worried about duplication (for me, with EDM) I just made it a point to spend at D, which Bouchard allowed me to do at just 7.7% owned. No real sweat with full stacking them, as I knew a sizable proportion of the field would just be playing Sennecke, or maybe one of McTavish/Cutter with him.

• My nine:

  

  I wrote my consideration set for stacks/defenders below and with their respective salaries in mind tried to sketch out a portfolio of 9 teams that matched my slate thoughts.

1. EDM ANA barely fit together with the full threes I wanted (Bouchard for EDM rather than cheap shit Ws), and TB2 was a stack I was on. Thus, I hoped for my two core pieces to explode together and used the bare minimum to scrape together Goncalves/Cernak/Gustavsson to get the team in.

2. EDM NSH3 was a lineup I probably hinted at directly on the pod, as NSH3 is getting substantial run together to start this season, with Stamkos breaking up NSH2 to play on NSH1. Marchessault was coming off of a 2-goal performance in Ottawa, and Bunting is a player I’ve always liked just fine. To get those two with Erik Haula for just $11600 was quite attractive with all getting some PP time. Two strong one-offs (Walker and McMichael) and a correlated goalie in Annunen finished off this team nicely.

3. NSH1 ANA2 was a similar idea, and in building I realized that I couldn’t realistically play four NSH1 players with ANA2, because all of ROR, Forsberg, and Stamkos were listed at W. ROR was an easy decision to drop, and thus a lineup of ANA2, Forsberg-Josi-Stamkos was built, with Hertl-Gostisbehere in as one-offs with an easy late pivot if needed if news broke somewhere. These Nashville pieces are just too cheap. I toyed around with converting the salary of McTavish-Hertl-Gost to an Eichel build, but opted to leave Hertl in, as he felt like a very solid one-off, since even if he smashed at 5%, the field was almost certainly not pairing him with Marner anyway. I love spots where I can one-off players and they can smash their salary without the field getting several spots right at once (Ovi on the PP1 and PP2 is the key example of this in action, since he can score three goals with no one getting even two assists and it’s not weirdness causing it).

4. EDM1 TB2 had another take of mine, that TB2 was actively a good play. Guentzel of course is very good, and at $6.7k I didn’t have to worry about him being owned, while Goncalves and Cernak (who is not just a cheap punt, but is TOI correlated with Cirelli generally) allowed me to fit McDrai + Bouchard in with Sennecke and Gustavsson.

5. WSH2 TB2 had two stacks I liked from the same game. These were the only stacks I was playing that were in the same game, and whenever that happens with a large enough lineup set I want to get the game stack in there. PP opportunities are contagious, in that it is proven that the biggest signal of drawing a penalty is.. having just taken a penalty. With two very good defensive options in Chychrun and Carlson, I went all the way in, leaving off Protas with WSH2, playing TB2 in full, and having plenty of salary. McDavid and Oettinger were the most expensive options and fit nicely. All of the TB/WSH pieces here have some PP involvement (even Goncalves has been a steadfast PP2 guy and decent 5v5 role, so he was a nice pivot off of Sennecke despite, ya know, being not so good at hockey), so in a game that goes 5-4 I’m almost certainly picking up multiple solid scores, with nice correlation too.

6. VGK1 ANA2 made sense to me because of the fact that while ANA2 was chalky, VGK1 was still projected as Eichel with Marner. On the off-chance that Eichel caught some steam (CGY sucks!) I was comfortable in that Stone (who finished last game on the top line) wouldn’t be paired with him by the field, and that was confirmed in warmups. I went from Dorofeyev-Gostisbehere to Theodore-Stankoven after lock, when Daccord (my only early player here) put up an absolute stinker. I don’t know if that was a prudent move, as the flex for Stankoven was not ideal but the salary range was barren. I figured Theodore would have to save me, and why not take a chance?

7. ANA2 DAL was a move I absolutely wanted to make, as I discussed on the podcast that you can grab any clump of six DAL skaters and one of two defensemen and build a legitimately good, correlated stack that would be competitive. I liked the spot for DAL volume, which didn’t really play out as they jumped out to an early lead, and with ANA2 I could fit the three strongest plays, plus Harley, with just enough for Annunen and Buium, who allowed me to capitalize on a game-stack with his PP involvement and offensive slant.

8. NSH1 EDM1 was something I wanted to do but was clearly overambitious, as salary didn’t work. Thus, this one turned into my one-off JRob team, which I wanted on this slate, with VGK3. Again, CGY sucks and Wild Bill and friends were a whopping $10500 the way I thought they would line up (and they did so). Ben Hutton also looked fine for the dead minimum, and I had enough faith in Annunen getting volume a la Cam Talbot that I used him once again.

9. ANA2 WSH2 was a lot of fun, I thought, and allowed me to fit a 3-3-2 with Rantanen and Harley when I was playing around with things. Getting a different goalie in Thompson was also critical, as my set was fairly concentrated! Chychrun and Harley also were not Morgan Rielly nor were they on the Carolina Hurricanes, so I thought their ceilings could truly separate at this position for me if EDM failed and dragged Bouchard down with them.

Results:

Bad. I love the process though. Great work by me. The only team that made anything back was the WSH TB gamestack with McDavid and Oettinger. Thankfully Oettinger got blown up for 41 shots against, or I was pulling $0 back on this monstrosity of a slate. I came real close to a second min cash with that #9 team, but Rantanen-Harley fizzled late and weren’t a part of either ENG, while ANA2 couldn’t generate more than just Cutter’s first period goal.

The clear problem, of course, was that not only did ANA2 only score once (and despite 5 PPs saw just 1 minute 10 seconds of PP time thanks to two PP1 shifts that ran the full two minutes with zone pressure and two PP1 executions early in the PP opportunity), but Edmonton completely failed.

Not only did they fail, but McDrai got split up mid second and never reunited, and EDM never drew a single PP opportunity! Sometimes you draw the shit end of the stick, and to not even get one PP opportunity was especially cruel. My targeted game going for a whopping two goals, while NSH TOR scores 11, is going to destroy any hope I had on the night. Had Toronto just coasted off of Matthews’ 3rd period goal to make it 5-2, instead of allowing two goals that then prompted two empty netters from the chalkiest combinations possible, it may have been possible to survive EDM duds with my other lineups, but it was too hard to catch the mass of lineups that benefited from TOR going from meh to donkeysmashes.

I was very confident that McDrai was together to stay, but now that I’ve seen it be split up I will believe that is in the range of outcomes in the future. I had probably upwards of 95% certainty that unless they were down 3 goals, McDrai was staying together all game, and I’m still not quite sure why the decision was made to split them. If that was closer to 75%, I probably side with Toronto and make it an effort to use a NSH piece like Josi, Forsberg, or Marchessault in most TOR lineups to try and differentiate. I don’t think I was landing on the TOR onslaught in any case, as I was always prioritizing both Cutter and Sennecke at W and the aforementioned NSH pieces were all mid-tier wings, leaving little space.

What Won:

The team I aggressively faded. Cool:

The winning team is rock solid, as the overstacks are always an interesting strategy, especially on a team with multiple scoring lines like TOR. I personally usually deploy something similar on larger slates (as the scores you need to win are lower as ownership is spread out across more players, as not everyone can smash), but since my portfolio was heavy on EDM, the texture didn’t make sense (I could just use values from other games with McDraichard) for me. I don’t know where in the Cicima-hell Mike Reilly and Oliver Ekman-Larsson came from, but they are defensible (CAR vacuum of minutes without Slavin, OEL PP2 option) at the very least, I guess. $100k later, I say good work lilprog3, next time please share the nut punt defenders with the class.

Friend of the newsletter Hunter had a good run up the board with the late CAR production with Oettinger, and starting from a solid TOR PP1 stack (with Cowan out, Nylander in vs. what a lot of people surely played with Carolina), he went ahead and piled Gostisbehere onto the CAR mini stack. Since Svechnikov would have been the common link between Gost and CAR2 mini, I guess I would have prioritized him, personally, but he was 12% (Stank was 13%, Blake a staggering 21%) and shit happens, I suppose. Blake’s goal was especially egregious, a one timer from the blue line that wasn’t clearly screened, and Ned just never saw it. Gostisbehere got in on the mix with a rush goal just before that, making it quite the third period. Sennecke and Oettinger also scream projection jams, so ultimately it’s a good team, but probably not one I am building and keeping myself given the clunky correlation. I do think I would have considered a Gost → Walker, Oettinger down to a Vasy-type in net, and Josi over Rielly to get a NSH-TOR gamestack. I would have loved to pull some other differentiation lever that wasn’t just “weird correlation” plus Nylander at 7.5%, because somehow more of the field played Nylander with Matthews than they did with Tavares despite Tavares being his full-time center.

mrgoodseats ran out the DFS masterclass of a lineup for a cool $20k, using the standard TOR1 line and turning the ANA chalk on its head by jamming Kreider-Leo, a very sharp move. I personally probably just play Killorn on it, rather than Granlund, but that makes it a 5v5 stack rather than a PP stack, and the PP1 is what won for ANA on Tuesday night. I could do without a 11% Jackson LaCombe, but the field playing him with ANA2 was my main issue with the play, and he actually did correlate with the PP stack mrgoodseats built. A very, very sharp team was finished off with Chychrun (an elite D play at just 5k and Sonny Milano on the PP1 - who knows how long that could last?) and Oettinger made a super late charge up the board. This finish probably ran a little bit bad, actually, as after the PPG to put them up 4-3, and Kreider on hat trick watch, Joel Quenneville ran out ANA2 to defend the lead. Cutter can fly, Mason is a faceoff ace and has a supercomputer in his head, and Sennecke has elite awareness at both ends, so this isn’t a total surprise (and I love the move!), but usually veterans like Kreider and Killorn are used to finish off games, he wasn’t tired, and he was on hat-trick + 5 SOG watch with Leo sitting on 2 assists. Those bonuses were absolutely in play and would have wrapped up the $100k for him. As it turned out, no one scored an ENG and he has $20k for his troubles. I don’t feel too bad.

Field Analysis:

It’s hard to judge Anaheim accurately after three games against three also-rans in SEA, SJ, and PIT, but I suspect ANA2 was underowned. They led the way in terms of TOI, while Troy Terry was absolutely feeling it last night, getting up to 20 minutes himself with Granlund. ANA1 was a bystander, but the PP production salvaged their night and took from ANA2’s chances. With newfound EN equity, ANA2 looks to be here to stay, and might be a true-talent 17k line if we confirm that the PP split was just happenstance in this game, which I believe it was. For that price, in this matchup, with the shot rates of McTavish and Gauthier, the floor was high, the ceiling was higher, and the pt/$ projection was insanely strong.

Per the Rotogrinders ResultsDB, an awesome free resource, 7% of the field (62 lineups) played McDrai with Bouchard, and there were 37 Mangias in this mix and 28 Tomaseks. I am out of practice with nearly ten years having passed since my final Calculus class, but my math shows that already is more than 100% coverage (with some playing both, of course), showing that my strategy of playing just McDraichard and going elsewhere for value was not too far off. It just didn’t work this time because the NHL hates me. These tertiary options are just bad hockey players, I don’t know why anyone is surprised that the three good players actively try to avoid giving them the puck.

There were six straight-up dupes in this contest, including one that surprised me - MTL1 + WSH2 + Carlson, LaCombe, Igor. The others were some combination of TOR/CAR/ANA slop. The irony of the duped WSH team is that Chychrun was $100 more than Carlson, and that team left $200 on the table, so there could have been a way out of that trap.

I didn’t see much of MTL or WSH in my pre-slate optimizer runs, with <10% of both when I set it up to give me 3+3 stacks with a small amount of variance to shake up the optimizer a bit and give me fun combos. Anaheim flooded these runs, but as expected the massive overlap came in when you paired Anaheim with Carolina or Toronto, especially if you then went down to Igor in goal at $7500.

Dallas was more owned than I expected, but JRob’s $5900 salary could be easily balanced wth Rantanen at $7700, as JRob came in over expectation at 15% and Rantanen was just 6%.

Jack Eichel was 9% owned and nuked for 30 (which, again, was much stronger in a world where Toronto doesnt get the EN bailout), yet was paired with his proper linemate in Mark Stone on just 2.6% of teams, whereas Marner accounted for 4.7% of teams. This is just a basic ball knower thing, where the optimizers are going to act like a situation is solid, without accounting for the context of the most recent game (line change in a loss to a bad SEA team), and in retrospect I should have been heavier on Jack than my one share. He even got benched for the end of the 1st period (as did Stone/Barbashev) and still came out firing late. If Stone gets in there for an ENG instead of VGK2, that mini stack is right in the hunt for a takedown.

All in all, going 1/9 sucks, but it’s pretty obvious why I lost, and I don’t necessarily chalk it up to playing bad. Sometimes, shit happens. It sucks when it goes awry on the biggest slate of the year so far, especially on the heels of a blown NFL opportunity on Sunday that I mentioned earlier, but we will dust off and get back in the streets. And god damnit, we will keep playing ANA2. My faith is unwavering, and is stronger than ever that they will carry us to the promised land.

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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