No Hats Left - Presidents' Day NHL DFS Slate Recap

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 January (which was also the night I won my FHWC seat!) December, November, and October and subscribe to the newsletter so you don’t miss out on future posts!

On Monday, the 12:30 EST start time changed things up from our normal routine. Given the extremely large contests with NBA All Star Break in full effect, I still wanted to put something out there to organize my thoughts and serve as a guide for others (but mostly for myself) to the day. As a result, I determined that a written accompaniment to the slate would be more useful than a podcast, which would be tougher to digest in bite-sized pieces as the slate developed.

With start times spread out by nearly 7 hours, several late-breaking news items (only some of which we were expecting), and a real close-but-no-cigar sweat from yours truly, I’m extremely pleased with the decision to dust off my NHL Slate Preview writeup skills (fun fact, I did one ~daily at Fantasy Insiders in 2016 while in college. I, too, never received a t-shirt, an ongoing Swolecast bit) and am even more pleased with how I played on Monday.

As part of all of these “flagship” slates, I (usually) 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 read Monday’s slate preview and are reading this, I’m likely going to make reference to it, so it may even be worth your time to check it out in the aftermath of the slate.

I played three lineups on Monday, cashing two in the $111 and coming fairly close to the top prize of $50k. Given the contest structure, however, I was left with a nice set of steak knives for finishing in 8th place.

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

These are the three teams I wound up with - this is not where I started, however.

I summarized my approach as-of Sunday night in the preview, so I’ll steal that:

A few general slate thoughts:

• I’m likely to pick from Vegas, Winnipeg, Dallas - I want EDM but am not sure there’s enough value to make McDavid work with what I want to do (which is fade Corey Perry, primarily).

• Shea Theodore. That’s the tweet.

• TOR2 is weaseling its way into my brain, but the TOR D situation is so fluid I may reserve TOR2 for something like a game stack with STL pieces if they are truly without Rielly, McCabe, and Liljegren.

• BUF and TB appear to have two of the highest team totals with reasonable prices, so I’m very mindful of ownership there. If it seems TB will be lower than 15% or so, Kucherov 25%, I have no problem stacking Kucherov into ownership particularly if we get Hagel L1 news. The field will just have to learn their lesson on Buffalo (or Tage can have his one monthly good game for Field, The).

• MIN1? Boldy leading the slate in xFPPG is not what I expected to see, and we just saw WPG1 do serious damage to this overrated VAN squad. Good defensively, yes, but MIN1 is the concentration of their three best players.

Furthermore, we received early news before DAL’s 1PM start that Miro Heiskanen would not play (birth of child), nor would Jani Hakanpaa and Nils Lundkvist. We also got confirmed lines for each of the teams playing at 7PM EST via their morning skates, featuring OTT changes and no Hagel on TB1, reducing the value of that line on a tightly-priced slate.

This information locked in Thomas Harley, for me, as I saw a clear path to 25+ minutes and a monopoly of PP time (Derrick Pouliot wound up mixing in on PP2, yet Harley still played 30 minutes in this OT thriller) in a matchup I was fixated on with Dallas’ strong play of late. I locked him in and moved on. Much later, ~one minute before 1PM, we also received word Matt Duchene was out. I could act like that influenced any decisions I made, but I was on these two DAL stacks before that broke. Make sure you’re hanging around Discord though, as my @everyone on Duchene saved a few folks with seconds to spare (and the swap to Wyatt worked out quite well, if you heeded my advice!)

Later in the afternoon, we got brand-new ARI lines, CGY tweaks, and a slow build-up of Shea Theodore activation news, only to find out that he would not, in fact, play on Monday against the Sharks.

My strategy was largely contingent on Thomas Harley - locking him in to all three lineups at 1PM was a stand I was confident in, and with the newfound DAL1 correlation I wanted to deploy that four-man unit and did so confidently, pairing it with David Pastrnak against a Dallas team that was relying on Esa Lindell, Harley, and Ryan Suter to shut down a top tier offensive threat. Pastrnak was deployed as a one-off and I capped the squad with a SEA 3-man stack of Wennberg, Burakovsky, and Dunn. I highlighted Burakovsky’s recent form in the preview, and really wanted to take advantage of what I felt were strong cheap values on a slate where the field was overconfident in Corey Perry.

My other two lineups I had plugged Shea Theodore in, with my non-DAL stack team looking like VGK2 + Theo + Stone, Harley on D, and Gourde/Boldy to cap off a 5-1-1 build with two one-offs I liked. I believe Hellebuyck worked salary-wise here, as well.

Lastly, I had a Harley-Johnston-Dellandrea-Oettinger locked in after briefly toying with Matthews (came off it plus adding STL elements after TOR being largely healthy defensively negated the game stack) in the 1PM window. I worked this lineup to close with MIN1 and a Theodore - Labanc dueling-one-off battle, with Kevin Labanc getting some love from coach Quinn after his most recent game and picking up PP2 time with a reasonable 5v5 role. Most importantly, he was $2.5k.

To bury the lede, this decision to stack MIN1 is clearly what won me money on this slate (who all hit plus Zuccarello, who I was simply never, ever playing). I was skeptical of the 6.5 total in my preview, but at the end came to the understanding that MIN1 is the concentration of their entire offense with great underlying performances, in a matchup that I personally had just exploited with WPG1 (a similar circumstance of top line being PP1 and the three ~best players) to the tune of 4 WPG1-involved goals, with a clear value in Matt Boldy priced at just $6k.

By the time 3:45 came around and VGK was going to be without Theodore, I realized that I had a DAL-MIN sweat (and this was before Zucc got in on the action and MIN brought it all the way back, meanwhile DAL was holding a late lead in the third period putting Oettinger in line for a W) so I was hyper-focused on that team.

I worked out several ways to swap this salary around with no Theo but wound up going with Stone and a punt D at $2.5k. One that sticks out? Necas & Pesce, worth 24.9 but not getting into the top three anyway.

After going Stone on the contending team and considering what I felt would be some VGK2 ownership, I figured I’d rather try and capture VGK production through Stone and fade VGK elsewhere, just in case, leading me to swap VGK2 + Theo + Stone to McDavid/Bouchard, Guenther/Cooley (listed at 5v5 with Keller), leaving enough for Necas. Boldy wound up “only” scoring 37, a phenomenal performance but clearly you needed to have the ~120 points that JEEK Kaprizov accumulated to get to the top, which effectively ended what I felt was a fun build betting on McDavid getting there without Perry (check) with a game-stack element based on late ARI news that clearly improved their outlook.

The first team had nothing to do, nothing to swap, so it is what it is after DAL1 did not get there.

Results: The punt D decision in that contending team was frustrating, as Kylington, De Haan, and Louis Crevier (CHI) were my options I was rifling between, so I opted to punt that decision to later after I had perfect info on how I was standing after DAL/MIN had each concluded.

Kylington scored the first goal of the 4PM window… Dallas blew their lead and lost in a shootout with several chances by Harley (post) and Johnston (missed net on 2 on 1 feed from Harley) to end it… MIN1 scored like six goals while I was on a fifteen minute outdoor excursion (some call this a “walk”)… Mark Stone didn’t do much… Logan Thompson’s shutout flew by me on the leaderboards and ultimately left me top ten with no path to first in an extremely top heavy contest… Calvin De Haan did not record a fifth(!!) hat trick on the slate to carry me to the top of the leaderboards, sadly, while Crevier outscored him by ~7 and Kylington by 10.

Elsewhere on the slate… Buffalo failed hilariously, though Best Player On The Sabres JJ Peterka put up 17 for $4.6k, as I wrote up, to lead the way if you rolled with him… ANA2 put up what we thought would be a slate-winning performance with all three of Terry, McTavish, and Vatrano breaking 20 fpts, those were fun times… JT Miller tallied the most overlooked hat trick in league history with JEEK and Kaprizov notching their own hat tricks later on… Sean Monahan quickly took the crown from JT Miller, recording a first period hat trick only for WPG to give up SIX goals (the first time in 31 games Helle has even allowed 4+ goals…) and score zero more en route to losing in convincing fashion… CAR performed well enough to push the Anointed One himself, Connor Bedard, into a three point night and a stranglehold on the Calder Trophy… And a lot of other stuff happened, this slate was awesome but also holy hell is it difficult to recap 10 hours of non-stop hockey in any sort of succinct way.

What Won: MIN1 + Zuccarello.

Oh, I guess you want analysis and to see screenshots. OK.

bbmon had a great night of NHL, with a 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 9th place finish to net nearly $55k in the $111 alone, based on Rotogrinders ResultsDB. A lot of MIN/SEA representation at the top of the board, which makes the ending of the Dallas game all the more painful, as Wyatt’s 23.5 points and Harley’s 17.5 were enough to compete, and an additional goal + Oett win flips the slate. Burakovsky and Schwartz each had good games for their salaries, while Dunn was better than Faber, his 2.6 littered among the MIN PP stacks up top.

In the $15, you needed to be a bit more.. Perfetti.. to win, as DollarBillW paired the nut MIN1 + Zuccarello stack with Monahan’s hat trick, needing very little out of Perfetti/Pionk to beat… himself… with MIN1 + Kadri (and my friend Kylington!) in 2nd place.

$35k in profit in a contest with $25k to first is a nice piece of handiwork.

Interestingly, Miller’s hat trick + MIN1 utilized as a gamestack constituted exactly one $15 entry, where mfarriswv was burned by Hellebuyck and an uninspiring effort from Elias Lindholm.

Finally, the $1450 FHWC Qualifier only had 17/20 entries, and having been hammered hard by the cold reality of a DFS downswing I did not enter it despite having two of my three teams comfortably smash these wealthy LOSERS (who have taken my money for the past calendar year, of course).

Free of any MIN in this small field contest, garnes222 coasted to victory on the back of a chalky 6-goal explosion from CAR, Tage’s 14.5 (stacked with 4th liner Kyle Okposo, because reasons) stacked with Logan’s 29-save shutout in a Thompson-centric build.

HossDaBeast wound up in 4th place with a stacked Boeser, Gibson’s win, 21 Ryan Suter points, and two goals from a TOR2 stack to cap it off. Seems impossible. The problem is he stacked Pettersson and Lindholm across 5v5 lines with Boeser, which was only a 30-point difference off his linemate JT Miller, who did far better than fellow JT John Tavares in his lineup (who posted 5.6 fpts)

DFS is hard. Tough beat, there.

Links:

DK FHWC

DK $111

DK $15

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

• BUF1 + Dahlin 4-man stack constituted an astonishingly high 5.2% of the field. That’s not including the 3.0% that was just BUF1 and the various combinations within. The Sabres. Of Buffalo. The field will never learn what we already know. These guys stink! Tage was a reasonable play, but Tuch/Skinner have simply not been good, and prioritizing Dahlin is fine but at this sort of ownership, you’re not even guaranteed that high a finish if it hits (not to mention needing to fade lineups with just BUF1 if Dahlin wasn’t perfectly connected or pieces like Cozens and Greenway if BUF hit in a monstrous way).

• Hellebuyck chalk was barreling down the tracks, priced as an underdog at -130 against a Flames team that can’t score. About that. 31% Hellebuyck crashed and burned, because goalies.

• One reason the slate felt so weird? The 4 players priced above $9k all failed spectacularly. Matthews (8.5% owned, 18.0 fpts), McDavid (20.1%, 11.5), Kucherov (17.4%, 2.6), and Pastrnak (6.4%, 13.0) each cratered the lineups they were part of, even if the MIN explosion hadn’t occurred and effectively boxed them out to begin with. At a combined ~50% owned, and pricing making it extremely difficult to fit multiples of these players, roster construction is an easy way to differentiate from the field. The second you fade this range, you can cut out half the field if all of just four players don’t go for at least 20, and you can likely build a lineup to compete with a score all the way up to 35-40 (depending on how these studs’ linemates fare, of course) from a $10k stud. This concept is why price sensitivity is so important in large-field tournaments and why a $2.5k punt is not the same as a $3.5k punt.

• One insane strategy that I didn’t really know how to work into this recap: Buckingham21 basically lock-buttoned 23 $111 teams built around WPG PP1 and CHI PP1. Aggressive, but we stan for our king Connors.

Final Thought: Monday is a situation we may literally face fewer than three times a season - massive prize pools and a slow drip of information throughout the day, with the slate evolving slowly over the course of several hours, information which should be informing your decisions post-lock. Usually these days are broken up into smaller slates. If you are able to maintain flexibility, stay on top of news, and weaponize every last bit of information, these slates will be profitable in the long-run over the thoughtless optimizer-users who aren’t checking back in regularly outside of injuries.

Stacking into the absolute mega nuts helps, too, which I highly recommend.

We’ll be right back here tomorrow for Tuesday’s $555 recap and a $200k winner. Can’t wait! Check out our podcast covering the slate here if you haven’t yet.

Thanks for reading.