Tuesday marks the start of the best time of the year, with the NHL season beginning. Not to be outdone, of course, the MLB playoffs are always fun as well! Extra fun when there are daytime games for this guy who works from home year-round.

REMINDER: Today is the final day to become a Moods Dude for a forever $5 discount off the annual price. See moods.beehiiv.com/upgrade for more details.

My plan for the week is as follows:

Reminder that I did a deep dive on every team, including the ten playing on Tuesday, in my preview series. The Pacific edition has links to the three others:

Later on in the season, I will have the usual Excel with the “rainbow chart” possessing xG trends, top players/values by expected fantasy points, and some other slate details.

Since this is the first week of the season, rather than make something that I personally won’t use, I’ve pulled this view of the slate from 4codds.com, a nice-looking odds aggregator that for other sports also includes player props (which makes line shopping tremendously easier) and hopefully that’s coming for NHL!

Woockey (Patreon.com/DFSHockey) designed a slick applet that is free as well that you should check out/bookmark: https://claude.ai/artifact/1sQuFix6AFZVJVKT1NqPgM

The NHL season officially kicks off at 5PM EST, though this is only on a (very small) DK Showdown slate. Bah humbug. I love the staggered slates with huge prize pools, as they make late swapping a legitimate +EV approach, and having two “windows” to swap in is extra fun.

The 7PM slate 4-game DFS slate brings two games with a 5.5 total and two with a 6.5 total, along with two big favorites and two games that are basically pick-ems. Without doing the actual math involved in the team totals, this results in a tiered list of just about the following implied team totals:

It is no surprise that EDM looks to be majorly chalky, and this slate will be about playing McDrai creatively or finding the right approach to pivot, be it alternate studs or multiple mid-tier stacks. Pricing feels fairly light at the top, but it’s also pretty bunched up in the middle, in that there aren’t a ton of obvious cheap values, especially up front.

D feels like a punt slate, but I think the position is strong enough that I could see a 3D build working to fit in stud forwards, with Evan Bouchard being especially interesting in this type of a build with McDrai.

DJ and I broke the slate down on YT here, or on the podcast apps (Apple here).

Listed Game Odds from DraftKings Sportsbook Monday latenight

Florida (+110) @ Carolina (-130) ||| o6.5 +105

Florida enters Carolina as slight dogs against the reigning Cup Champs. I was a bit shocked to open the showdown slate (these prices are Captain salaries, if that wasn’t obvious) to find that Samson was the highest priced player on the entire slate. I suppose the FD goal line feeling low as mentioned in my Atlantic best bets didn’t apply to the DK pricing algo!

Samson is awesome, and I think he’s going to have a major bounce back season with Barkov back and keeping his PP1 job, but I would think one of the Tkachuks should be more expensive, right? These four will make up the PP1 alongside Seth Jones, who is pretty nondescript. I don’t think any of these players are underpriced, though Forsling may be the closest, as last year was an oddly down year for him, and whether it was injury or the team situation, he just had zero of the offensive juice he had shown in years past. While PP time is off the table, Forsling may just be a necessary punt in the DK SD streets (where you can win ones of dollars).

I am not placing any early bets on Verhaeghe or Bennett, I worry a bit about TOI here (though the lack of a fourth line helps matters) and there are no weak lines to pick on in Carolina, doubly so on the road.

That said, the SOG props all feel low. I know the edge shades under, the Canes don’t allow much, and the league doesn’t count a lot of what used to be shots a few years ago, but Brady Tkachuk in his debut is -115 for 3 shots, +205 for 4, and +450 for 5. 7 gets you 20/1. Do we really think Rod’s system is dialed in game 1 for the team that just won the Stanley Cup?

For reference, I took a peek at least year’s season opener (allowed 3 goals on 22 shots vs NJ) and first game back post-Olympics (allowed 4 goals on 28 shots), and there might be something to this? They won these games, by the way, with 11 goals scored.

At the other end of the spectrum, Anton Lundell at +115 seems really sharp for 2+ shots, he’s guaranteed PP time with ERod gone and Marchand injured, and he’s much more of a rate shooter than either Luostarinen or Vilmanis.

Reinhart is +195 for a goal, which was my favorite goal/point market on a glance, especially if you are looking for something plus-money that isn’t a shot prop.

MOODS’ DUDES: Samson Reinhart, Brady Tkachuk, Anton Lundell

Carolina hosts the first game of the NHL season after winning the last, doing it this time without Seth Jarvis and Alexander Nikishin. No Nikishin doesn’t appreciably change anyone’s 5v5 role, but it makes the team less fun, and it should give K’Andre Miller a slight boost with some PP2 work. Jackson Blake is the largest benefactor from Jarvis’s injury, at least from a fantasy standpoint.

Stacking for DFS or SGPs is interesting, as Staal will take PP1 faceoffs, then change for Ehlers when the puck is cleared. Depending on how long that shift is, Staal will be PP2 with Ehlers amidst those line changes, or Jankowski will hop over if Staal is not ready. If your book allows for SGPs of unders, I would at least take a peek at Staal + Ehlers on a combination of one to get a point and the other not to get a point, as the PP listings may show them together but it’s extremely rare for them to actually be on the ice together, and you’ll get the negative correlation boost from them being on the same 5v5 line. If you don’t get a negative correlation boost, of course, then you should just find a same-line same-pp pair to bet the overs on both!

CAR1 vs. CAR2 is made even more interesting now by the inclusion of Eric Robinson on the top line. I prefer CAR1 in general (see my CAR team preview for more) but this seems like a CAR2 spot. Jackson Blake feels underpriced relative to his linemates when you consider that Blake gets the bump to the top unit PP, and is (slightly) better to begin with.

A -115 point prop feels really solid to me, compared to -105 and +100 for his linemates. That’s my favorite prop from this side of the matchup.

MOODS’ DUDES: Andrei Svechnikov, Jackson Blake, Shayne Gostisbehere

Montreal (-102) @ Toronto (-118) ||| o6.5 +102

Montreal is priced as effectively a pick’em as they head into Toronto. These two teams could not have trended more differently last season, but Toronto has made sweeping changes up and down the organization, coaching staff, and roster. I’m not super in the market of “beating the books” on stuff like this, and I don’t have a strong opinion here especially without knowing Marchenko’s status.

Juraj Slafkovsky moving down to the second line could hurt the Suzuki-Caufield pairing, but I don’t think Kreider is as bad as the whole “he agreed to terminate his contract in Anaheim” thing would suggest. He had some solid underlyings, and we know his game will mesh well with a prototypical sniper and playmaker (TWF?) combo.

I want to be early and often on the MTL1 “regression is fake for superstars” train, so now might be a decent opportunity. $18.7k is an interesting price range for a full-line stack on the slate, as McDrai is $16.5k to start with for two players and Toronto is exceptionally high priced, especially if Marchenko doesn’t play or is $6k+. You naturally get access to different combinations from the EDM stuff, even if the EDM stuff hits in a way that doesn’t end the slate.

Noah Dobson is -145 for two shots, a number that is basically right on last season’s average (47 games with 2+ shots in 80 tries), but I think the fact that the second line might be able to drive play better with Slafkovsky there (and Demidov improvement YoY) should inch his rates upward, toward where he sat on the Islanders. Dobson has a colossal 5v5 rate historically, so this game also profiling as a shootout is just a secondary consideration of mine in chasing a shot prop here.

MOODS’ DUDES: Cole Caufield ($7100), Chris Kreider ($4900), Noah Dobson ($5000)

Toronto is a really tough team to discuss from a DFS standpoint, as the pricing is simply out of control here. Auston Matthews is priced higher than Leon Draisaitl, though I would guess Draisaitl’s raw DK projection is 2-3 points higher. Willy Nylander is worth a $7500 price tag, but neither Tavares nor McKenna should be in the 6k range, McKenna especially.

If playing Matthews or Nylander, my favorite stacking mate is actually Darren Raddysh, assuming Marchenko doesn’t get added at some bargain bin salary (lower than Raddysh’s $5700 is my line). Raddysh was amazing in Tampa playing along with Kucherov on the PP1, and it’s time for the bald eagle to spread his wings and fly in a new location. I think he can translate his game to another super talented PP1, just ignore that Roslovic guy and hope he’s got Brayden Point’s gravity-to-scoring ratio from last year to open up Raddysh’s point shot.

Despite TOR being a slight favorite in the moneyline, Toronto and Montreal have the exact same odds on team total (o3.5 +125), which amuses me. Lastly, if Marchenko doesn’t play, keep an eye out for Easton Cowan or someone to slide up the lineup to L1. They’ll be interesting, especially Cowan at +425 to score, equal to that of bottom sixers Kirby Dach and Zach Bolduc. Darren Raddysh is also interesting at +425, but I think I’d rather go elsewhere on the slate than resort to that unless it winds up being super off-market.

Ultimately, I find it really hard to play Toronto over Montreal given pricing, and I don’t think MTL ownership will be to the point where I need to pivot from the pivots.

MOODS’ DUDES: William Nylander ($7500), Darren Raddysh ($5700)

NY Rangers (-105) @ Boston (-115) ||| o5.5 -130

I am a noted advocate now for both L1 and L2 for NYR, with my Zibanejad deep dive in the Tale Of Two Halves series and then my Dorofeyev love in the team preview. If forced to pick a lane, I guess I am choosing JT Miller over Alexis Lafreniere, with the tiebreaker for now being that we know Adam Fox is very good, and that he’s more attached to Zibanejad than Miller. This new-look 2nd pair of Marcus Pettersson and Sean Durzi, however, is brand new, and I love Sean Durzi the player, especially as a puck-mover. Having a rookie like 5th pick Alberts Smits (minimum salary on DK) with Schneider is also extremely interesting, so the D depth on the Rangers is literally improved at every spot from last year if you ask me. Taking advantage of that early is my perceived edge here, and I like the NYR moneyline and will almost certainly be playing Igor ahead of the other goalie options (though that’s not likely to be sneaky or anything).

Dorofeyev is a wonderful scorer, and JT Miller has some very impressive stats prior to last year’s more pedestrian output. This could be the beginning of the end of JT, or that was a blip in a year with a bad D corps to play with (Fox missed substantial time, even) set to rebound with an excellent (and well-paid) winger riding shotgun. I think Dorofeyev bounces back from a dismal 5v5 showing last year, rather than showing that he is just a one trick pony who can only score on the power play.

I don’t see any bets here I love, maybe a Zacha u0.5 points -105? NYR is more interesting in DFS than in any shot/point markets I see, it seems, as Doro goal +170 feels a bit thin. The DFS prices feel very fair, however.

MOODS’ DUDES: Mika Zibanejad ($6200), Pavel Dorofeyev ($5400)

Boston has a couple immediate standout values in JJ Peterka (L1 PP1, $4100) and Hampus Lindholm (D1 PP1, $3400). I do wonder how popular the pairing is, or if Vasily Podkolzin gets a bunch of ownership at $4k, and then the field winds up just using Hampus as the obvious value. I greatly prefer Peterka to Podkolzin, as we’ve seen McDrai time and again produce without their linemate doing anything by nature of puck touches.

Boston has a few sources of value down the middle, with Zacha, ELindholm, and Minten all priced nicely. If I do play any Boston (see previous blurb about NYR), it’ll likely be via mixing and matching a C with Pastrnak and Hampus, as Pasta should double shift in interesting ways and the Cs can all get there with just one goal or an assist plus a little bit, both of which Pasta would help with in a game where Boston produces. It’s just really hard to see Pastrnak beating McDrai in a way that truly separates in this matchup.

Minten + Hagens feels a tad thin for now, but of course playing it before we see it is always an option as I believe Hagens is monstrously talented. Laba-Cuylle and the new depth D pairs though worry me.

I just do not believe there is much of a reason to believe Boston is getting the better end of any 5v5 line matchups, so I’ll just call this my least favorite spot and get to the rest of the games.

MOODS’ DUDES: JJ Peterka ($4100), Hampus Lindholm ($3400)

Vancouver (+235) @ Edmonton (-290) ||| o6.5 -115

Vancouver brought us a scare with the Jake DeBrusk injury situation, but they pretty much clarified immediately he would be OK and plans to play on Tuesday. I didn’t see that with my head down to finish up the Pacific preview, but that’s fine. I’m not losing sleep over the Canucks team preview, I promise. Relative to team total, you just can’t really sell me on any Vancouver PP guys being good DFS plays. There are plenty of options for cheaper that have similar workloads.

One spot where we can get some salary relief though is Jonathan Lekkerimaki. He was brutal in an NHL showing last year, but injury may have played a role and I still believe in the prospect. It’s been made clear in the media that the org does too. He was allegedly shut down in February for a shoulder injury suffered in October, and meanwhile he had a great run of form in the AHL, continuing clear growth from a strong SHL start into constant improvement as an AHLer. It’s very risky to discount NHL games when projecting NHL futures for players, but Lekkerimaki looks the part of an offensive weapon, even while injured apparently, and I love the way he has progressed both his primary point rate (below) and shot rates to extremely good levels outside the NHL.

If he was just now showing up at 22, with the org telling us under new leadership that they were done yoyo-ing players up and down from the AHL as was specifically the case for Lekkerimaki, I’d be over the moon excited for what a full season could look like, so for $2.5k having played on two of the worst teams the NHL can offer up the past couple of years, I’ll take a swing alongside two decent players in EP40 and DeBrusk.

After all, if you zoom out on his NHL stuff, he’s technically a slightly above-average goalscorer at 5v5 in both of his two NHL campaigns (108 and 111 indexes) It doesn’t hurt that his success has come with Manny Malhotra behind the bench in Abbotsford, and with Ryan Johnson as that team’s GM too.

Rather than get fancy, just bet on Lekkerimaki if anything here at the DK minimum and +425 to score. Hopefully other props get added for him.

MOODS’ DUDES: Filip Hronek ($4400), Jonathan Lekkerimaki ($2500)

I basically tackled Edmonton already, as they only have a few relevant players for our purposes, even in the dream spot at home against Edmonton.

PP1 Grades:

Consistency: 10/10. This is the PP1, and they will also play a bunch of PP2 time as well if history is any indication.

Talent: 10/10. McDavid. Draisaitl. Bouchard. Yes please. The only thing better is if we got these guys all the time including 5v5!

Intrigue: 10/10. I cannot overstate just how dramatic a shift I would give to the Art Ross and Rocket Richard races if McDrai holds for 84 games. There’s absolutely no chance I would take MacKinnon 1.01, and might even take Drai 1.02 in fantasy. These guys are unreal together, and adding Bouchard as part of their five-man unit is some legendary stuff. I am glad that Hyman is not on the line, as he feels duplicative from a playdriving standpoint and should be used to try and shore up another line as Babcock has done.

Statistically, however, over the past three years McDrai + Bouchard has played ~850 5v5 minutes together, and 500 of those are with Hyman and a shocking 5.51 GF/60. Without Hyman, the three drop to 3.57. So that’s an option, and has been their best option, but you’re just admitting middle six defeat at that point with this roster.

I’m not sure that it’ll work, but I am ever so curious to find out.

I think this is a “shut up nerd, with your fancy stats like “goals per hour” and all that” spot where you trust that these guys will figure it out without Hyman, or just run hot anyway despite the lower-than-you’d-expect results. The PP1 can obviously do all the damage, anyway.

The clear point of leverage is Vasily Podkolzin, and whether you play him or fade him. I lean toward fade, and use the high-end Oilers mixed with other low-end teams to try and find the right combination of players. Podkolzin is a very high rate hitter, for the UD folks, and is actually slightly above average each of the past two years in shots + blocks rates, with the points only following last year. But the trend is positive, he’s playing with two of the best players in the world, and is in a classic revenge spot (for the eighth time.. with three points so far). I suspect he’s just overplayed for how likely he is to outscore all of his price cohort.

I crunched all the numbers in the end of the Pacific preview and came to the conclusion that with the McDrai news, the best bet was… Evan Bouchard for the Norris. A fair and balanced newsletter, this is. I like Draisaitl ATG +105 on DK.

MOODS’ DUDES: Connor McDavid ($8500), Leon Draisaitl ($8000), Evan Bouchard ($6700)

Chicago (+210) @ Vegas (-258) ||| o5.5 -135

We did a bunch of live processing of the Chicago lines situation on the show, as I did not initially believe that despite spending all of camp lined up one way, Chicago was just going to reverse course and blender their entire top three lines on the eve of opening night.

Well, Chicago definitely blendered their entire top three lines on the eve of opening night and Jeff Blashill, to his credit, talked a ton about the thinking behind each decision.

Splitting up Frondell’s line in preseason was the main driver, IMO, as it was terrible and had a 14% xGF% in their two games. Moving Oliver Moore to the W and Roman Kantserov to C was mostly derived from Blashill’s trust in each player, which would make sense that they are starting the year alongside presumed #1 W Patrick Kane in his return to the team. We don’t really know what Kantserov will look like, but he has a dominant KHL showing under his belt and is 22 years old. If he can start the year with any sort of strong effort, it seems like he’s got the inside track to be a Bedard winger (or have Bedard on his wing?) when the wunderkind returns.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for this slate, Frank Nazar centers Donato and Nick Lardis. All three players have strong track records, and only Donato slid the wrong way last season. It was upwards trajectory big time for both Lardis and Nazar, and Blashill trusts Nazar perhaps more than any individual forward at this point in time. I would not be surprised in the slightest to see this unit play true top six minutes against Vegas, and they cost $11.1k with full PP2 correlation. No Bedard could mean that the PP units are split more evenly than you see later in the season, and Donato spent much of last year frozen out of PP work (29% of available time), driving some of the decline we see at the Overall level. He was merely fine at 5v5, however, after being quite good in his earlier Chicago time.

Lastly, the Moods Dudes not-yet discussed are Anton Frondell (the PP version) and Bowen Byram. These two are such a strange price as a duo, but could very well be the centerpiece of a successful CHI PP1. Frondell arrived from the SHL and immediately was put on the PP1, carrying an insane 30% shot share as a rookie. They set him up on that right half-wall to just hammer pucks on goal, but didn’t get much success out of it. The offensive tools are absolutely in the bag for him if he can just survive his 5v5 minutes with two not-so-great play drivers in Bertuzzi and Mangiapane:

Byram take from the preview: Byram has spent his entire NHL career in the shadows of Cale Makar and Rasmus Dahlin. I’m not sure how anyone can say that we know what his ceiling is. While he’s battled injuries over the years, the past five seasons Byram is 36th among all defensemen in 5v5 points. When you account for his role and missed games by looking at points/60, he’s 19th. And that’s without MacKinnon in Colorado, for the most part. He is 13th, a smidge ahead of Dahlin himself, in goals/60 over 5 years. Having just turned 25 years old, he’s squarely in his prime and has played 82 games in each of the past two seasons. If you can take a top 20 5v5 defenseman and add more minutes and PP1 duties to the mix, you have the makings of a defender who can easily crack the top ten in D scoring, off the board around D22. His shots + blocks don’t look to be strengths, but the point upside is through the roof.

He is $4300 on this slate and appears to be lost in the shuffle. His point prop is +140, and I know the team total is low but he shouldn’t be less likely than Tyler Bertuzzi (+120) to get a point. To score at 7/1 is fine too, given his 5v5 goalscoring prowess noted above and PP1 role, but Nick Lardis at +500 might be my favorite longshot of the day.

MOODS’ DUDES: Anton Frondell ($5800), Bowen Byram ($4300), Nick Lardis ($3200)

Last up, we have Vegas. VGK threw in a jumpscare yesterday with the Victor Olofsson PP1 situation, but it appears to have been clarified (after I hit publish on the preview, of course) that this was a 5v3 PP scenario. Great. Shea Theodore season is back on… unless a Blackhawk PKer tucks their jersey in wrong, then it’s night night for him. Always a fun sweat.

I am the Shea Theodore guy, but I can’t really see a world where I spent $5400 for him in a world where Bouchard is on the slate for $1300 more, Byram in the same game is $1100 less, and Hampus Lindholm projects to play about as many minutes with a similar rates profile to him and is $2k cheaper. If you play Theodore, I think you need to play Eichel with him, as that 5-man unit at 5v5 is pretty constant and is really the only way I see a Theo play pay off.

I want to bet on Eichel early as a goalscorer, but it’s hard when he’s priced at the same level as guys who we know carry the load offensively, in what I see as a better matchup. If the gulf was even $1k of difference, I’d be more in, but for now I think you just have to plug your nose and go all in on Vegas if you go this route.

I’d rather take a stab at Hertl’s line for cheaper, as Hertl suffered from some bad luck especially late last year and into the playoffs, but his year as a whole was fine and I don’t believe he’s washed or anything close to it. He gets a new talent infusion on his wings with the addition of Trevor Connelly to the mix and the re-signing of Victor Olofsson for this year. Connelly in particular has a ton of playmaking ability that could unlock Hertl’s production at 5v5 (0.29 goals per 60 last year after 0.79 through two years as a Golden Knight, in line with career average), but it’s worth noting that Hertl also didn’t score with Marner last year (0.20 G/60) so the fit will also have to be right.

If ownership and everything is the same, I think I would go VGK3 by a hair over CHI3, but if there’s any signs that the field wants to use EDM1 - VGK3 as a High-Low stack combo of the two large favorites, I am more than happy to flip to the CHI side, as I think there is more minutes upside and fairly equal goal odds.

MOODS’ DUDES: Jack Eichel ($7700), Tomas Hertl ($4700)

That’ll do. Good luck on this slate! REMINDER: Sub by 7PM EST tonight for the OG Moods Dude forever discount. Thank you to everyone who has signed up, and to those who just want to read what’s in front of the paywall. Let’s have a great season!

As always, thanks for reading!

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