Oct. 18th Friday NHL Daily Fantasy Overview

We’re back for a fun little Friday slate. You should be subscribed to The Morning Skate Podcast where we covered the Tuesday and Thursday slates, and I recapped the Tuesday $100k to first GPP in the newsletter (and DJ took down the Underdog slate that same night!). Thanks to everyone who has joined and to those who have continued following along, we’ll have one more weekend without the NBA before their season starts. Let’s take advantage of the juiced prize pools until then!

Let’s dive in. Check out the Toronto-Montreal writeup from last Wednesday for a brief tutorial on the columns in my Excel sheet, posted for each team. All stats from naturalstattrick.com unless otherwise noted.

Odds and Totals from DK Sportsbook

Carolina (-148) @ Pittsburgh (+124) ||| o6.5 -102

Playing just their third game of the year after a late opener followed by a postponement, Carolina has lost 4-1 to Tampa and beaten New Jersey 4-2 so far this year. Against two of the better teams in the East, Carolina has done enough to comfortably lead the NHL in 5v5 xGF/60, a shade over 4.0. There’s no real reason to suspect this team is anything but what they have been, which is an offensive juggernaut that will create chances at will. Sebastian Aho drives the bus offensively, checking in at $7000 on DK and with an impossibly light projection on Underdog (C6 and tied with Vatrano), centering Jarvis and Svechnikov on a perfectly correlated 1st line, 1st PP unit.

Aho is unlikely to crack any bonuses, but is an efficient scorer, helping pave the way to full line stacks with Andrei Svechnikov, a walking shot-bonus candidate who has 16 attempts in the two games so far, and Seth Jarvis, one of the top U23 offensive weapons in the sport who appears primed to build upon last year’s 33G 34A campaign.

For just $18400, CAR1 is a priority on Friday night. Further down the lineup, Necas remains interesting at $4700, especially with two linemates for a combined $6200 who get secondary PP run as well. The third line is a defensive-only line, and the fourth won’t get enough minutes to garner interest in anything but the largest of GPPs.

Shayne Gostisbehere is $3600, far too low for a player who will be a PP1 staple with strong rates and a 5v5 role that appears to be dead even with the other 5 defenders at the moment. Two games is not enough to be certain, but it sure looks as if Sean Walker is a good enough player so that the pairing can hold their own in 18-19 minutes TOI, critical to ensuring Gostisbehere has a DFS floor to go with his ceiling.

Brent Burns is sliding downward in price, yet remains doing Brent Burns things, hucking 14 shots at the net so far (only 3 on goal) to go with three blocked shots. $4400 is perfectly fair. I don’t hate any of the other depth defenders, but will avoid them in my personal play.

MOODS’ DUDES: Sebastian Aho ($7000), Andrei Svechnikov ($6000), Shayne Gostisbehere ($3600)

Fresh off a multi-milestone game, Pittsburgh moves back to underdog status on Friday. Evgeni Malkin ($6000) scored his 500th goal on Wednesday amidst an outrageous start to his season, currently leading the NHL in points with 11 in five games. There’s nothing unsustainable about his production, either, as by my expected fantasy point calculation (accounting for shot attempts, primary assists, individual expected goals, and blocks) his results are right in line with his process.

Geno is back. It turns out a functional powerplay is really, really good for him, and he’s only attempting 12% of the shots on the PP to this point in the year. For a guy who in his career fluctuates between 25-30%, I expect a functional powerplay to draw more attention to Sid and Karlsson and leave Geno open to attack downhill more often for quality scoring chances. I prefer saving the $1700 off Sid to play Geno, and will strongly consider pairing Geno with a defender (Karlsson or Letang are both PP1) and a third member of the stack could be Rakell or Bunting, with Rakell having the sexier name and production (3G 0A 10SH), while Bunting saves $100 and likely is lower owned (0G 1A 12SH).

Carolina depth is too strong and Pittsburgh is too weak, so I’m not considering any other PP2 members or depth lines, in this spot.

MOODS’ DUDES: Evgeni Malkin ($6000), Erik Karlsson ($5500), Michael Bunting ($4000)

San Jose (+260) @ Winnipeg (-325) ||| o5.5 -120

The punchless Sharks will be without Celebrini once again on Friday, coming off a 4-2 loss to Chicago where the xGs told the story, Chicago winning the battle 3.9 to 1.9. Brutal.

I truly don’t think you can reasonably play a single Shark in any situation, this team is just horrific and slants way too defensive for my liking with Granlund and Wennberg centering the top two lines.

Granlund has been averaging 4 shots a game in the first four, so if you’re a fan of small sample sizes (and 72% shot efficiency, the league average for Fs is ~55-60% of attempts going on goal), the top line pairing of Granlund and Toffoli will be perfectly correlated, play a boatload of minutes, and check in at $9800. The third member of that line (as-of this writing, that is; I strongly encourage SJ stackers to check warmups for confirmation) William Eklund is among the least fortunate players in the league, where his play to-date should result in ~14 xFP/G, and he’s only at 9.2 (pre-bonuses). With strong prospect pedigree, this could be the start of an emergent fantasy producer, though on a (far worse) team last year, Eklund did not offer much in fantasy relevance and is priced too close to other more-useful fantasy players for my liking at $4500.

I’m not fully buying it, these aren’t My Dudes, but that’s the argument for SJ1. To mention anyone else would be disingenuous, as I don’t see it.

MOODS’ DUDES: Keep on Scrollin’

The only thing that may keep the -320 Jets in check is the 5.5 total. Ownership hardly matters on 3-game slates, but these guys will of course be at the top of the list. Winnipeg offers three legitimate lines to choose from, with Connor-Scheifele-Vilardi costing considerably more but having the best players and roles, Nino-Lowry-Appleton costing far less for a similar TOI role but worse rates, and Perfetti-Namestnikov-Ehlers being similarly cheap with worse minutes but better players from a fantasy upside standpoint.

Perfetti is particularly interesting here, as he’s shown strong rates in limited minutes to date and is playing alongside the king of generating production in a limited role in Nik Ehlers. Ehlers also gets the PP1 boost, though with just 5 PP minutes in three games it’s tough to get a read on what that role truly looks like. I prefer stacking Ehlers through his 5v5 linemates, as my assumption is that if this game is 3-0 in the mid-2nd as I suspect it will, WPG2 will not be as at-risk of a TOI reduction here as they would in a normal game environment, where Winnipeg goes into full lock-down mode.

The Sharks, especially without Celebrini, offer a great opportunity to try out players like Perfetti and Ehlers in defensive situations that they otherwise would not likely play in, which will come in handy come playoff time for a Jets team that could really use a defensive ace to emerge amongst their forwards. I’ve grinded some tape and can confirm, Mark Scheifele and Kyle Connor are not that.

Defensively, Josh Morrissey is Fine but not a one-off standout and of course is highly correlated to the chalk PP1 pieces on this slate. If punting the position, Haydn Fleury has a perfectly reasonable NHL-average shot rate and started off this season averaging over 3.5 shots+blocks a game. If he got even half of his attempts on goal, the D average, that’d be north of 4.0 per game. Not bad for $2700, though 3rd pair linemate Colin Miller at $2500 might just be the play with his cannon of a slapshot and PP2 role.

MOODS’ DUDES: Kyle Connor ($7400), Nikolaj Ehlers ($5200), Cole Perfetti ($3200)

Anaheim (+195) @ Colorado (-238) ||| o6.5 -125

The Brock Band heads to Colorado fresh off a scintillating finish against Utah on Wednesday, Leo Carlsson winning the game in OT with a dazzler. You may have heard of Leo, the #2 Overall pick two years ago, leading this group of highly-touted prospects into the future. He closed the game paired with Alex Killorn and Brock McGinn as Greg Cronin made the decision to bench Cutter Gauthier, throw him back onto the ice, then bench him again.

This coming from the guy who healthy scratched Olen Zellweger doesn’t bode well, but it’s a short slate and information might be sparse. I expect Cutter to keep his L1, PP1 job into the future, but of course a shot-first tool player carries a much wider range of outcomes than your fully-formed supercomputer megalords like Michkov and Celebrini. That’s the name of the game, and I think a rising price ($3800) keeps Cutter low enough to be worthy of a play. Leo’s domination has done exactly what one might expect, elevating his most-frequent linemate in Cutter to a solid 4.7 shot attempts per game through three games (including effectively missing a full period last game), and nearly 1 ixG (with no goals, no assists to show for the effort). 9 expected fantasy points vs. 3 actual fantasy points per night might help your coach find the rationale to bench you, too.

The fates should turn, but the entire Ducks team is underpriced, matchup notwithstanding. When that matchup is an extremely shallow team to begin with that is missing an entire shift of Very Useful NHL players and is less likely to make a save than the Chicago White Sox bullpen, Anaheim becomes very interesting.

Frank Vatrano remains firing, at $5300, but has only a PP2 job (and apparently a 5v3 PP job) while everyone else checks in sub-$5000, which should help spread ownership out. You can reasonably consider all of it, I lean toward PP1 stacks of Cutter, McTavish, Leo, and Terry. Zegras and Fabbri looked surprisingly competent together, however, and McTavish is an MSP favorite, so no complaints there.

Olen Zellweger ($3500) leads the defensive unit in PP role and is paired with captain Radko Gudas, but apparently this is Pavel Mintyukov’s team now. Minty caught lightning in a bottle, scoring twice in 22 minutes and going +3 against Utah, and comes in at $3200 with similar rates to Olen and PP2 time for a team that tends to split down the middle (at least until Cutter finds his goal-scoring touch, that is…).

I’ll always be an Olen guy, as his pre-AHL numbers were simply obscene (and you can see based on 2022-23 OHL stats that Mintyukov, while a very, very good player, doesn’t have the same offensive/fantasy potential in his arsenal despite the multi-goal game last time out), and there’s something to be said in riding the hot hand on a team that is desperate to find its next superstar to lead the team out of the dark ages.

MOODS’ DUDES: Mason McTavish ($3900), Cutter Gauthier ($3800), Olen Zellweger ($3500)

Colorado is 0-4 despite their PP hitting at a 50% clip to start the year, tops in the NHL. Perhaps a league-worst 54% PK is to blame. Or maybe it’s Cale Makar’s fault.

It’s gonna be really hard to overthink Colorado. The top line seems like it’ll stick, based on Wood being healthy (Drouin/Toews have been ruled out already) and Bednar saying how much liked the look of Kovalenko, Mittelstadt, and LOC. Assuming he’s not the 3rd line center and.. Miles Wood doesn’t get put on the top line (???), Ross Colton is the exact sort of player we love to roster when he’s in an elevated role. On a per-minute basis, he loves to shoot the puck and will be productive offensively, making his $4200 tag alongside Mikko and MacKinnon far too cheap. The dude can shoot it, and his teammates know this too, often using his shot as a weapon when the PKers sell out to stop the three-headed monster on the exterior. The field will be onto this one, too. Don’t worry about that.

Cale Makar rules, but pricing and a 3-game slate makes it very difficult to build around Colorado’s three superstars without having to make substantial sacrifices in your lineup (whereas on larger slates, there would be more projectable options in the cheap ranges). I think there’s more than enough here so far to take the plunge, but you’ll need all three to be among the top ~five DFS scorers of the night to finish in first place. It may be worth picking two, hoping the third finishes 3rd on the team in DFS scoring (or 4th, behind Colton!), and trying to hit on a high-upside stack elsewhere.

…ok, you caught me. Yes, I will be trying to fade Nathan MacKinnon at $9800 for the 115th consecutive slate, and yes I will be getting burned. Maybe the 116th try will be the charm!

MOODS’ DUDES: Mikko Rantanen ($9000), Cale Makar ($8700), Ross Colton ($4200)

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this breakdown, 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.