Post-Slate Reflections - $360 Spin Night on DraftKings

Tuesday’s NHL DFS slate started early on Monday, with the introduction of the first flagship GPP of the 23-24 season on DraftKings, the $360 Spin-O-Rama. In typical DK fashion, they vastly undersold the contest, limiting the prize pool to $300k in total but doling $100k of it out to first place. In addition to this contest (which filled by ~3:30 EST on Tuesday afternoon, meaning it could have supported likely up to at least $400k in prizes if not more), DK also ran a $15 GPP with $50k to first and several other “good” contests, at least for the NHL lobby.

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 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, I’ll of course cover where I’m looking to stack teams, where to find values, etc. as a full strategy show.

I often spend some time as the late games wind down or in the AM reviewing my play, often complaining about the outcomes in Discord or disparaging myself for “playing mentally weak”, but the goal of this series is to levelheadedly assess my strategy and shed some light on how the 22nd-ranked NHL DK Player (based on RotoGrinders, which has ~3k people tracked. Top 1%!) goes about the slate.

Leave space for applause to die down

Between a handful of won tickets and a few buy-ins, I opted to run with eight total lineups on Tuesday, entered into the $360, $40, $15, $9, and $5 contests plus one to two satellites for each. I also put one “main” build into the $691 11-man high stakes contest, which I won’t specifically cover but is something I deeply enjoy especially on these large slates.

All in all, I had ~$4.4k in volume entered across all contests, only playing the Main slate (I sometimes play the turbo/night slates, which likely would have gone fairly well given my priorities on the slate, but no way to know for sure) and returning ~$4.5k on the night. Certainly not the banger of a night we all dream of on these flagship nights, but well above the “average” expectation when you’re playing top-heavy (and in this case, extremely top-heavy) contests.

Most of that $ came from my “main” lineup, #1, which in addition to the contests listed above where it min-cashed, I finished 2nd out of 11 in the $691 for a tidy $2k. Otherwise, I had one deep cash in #5, finishing 25th out of 925 in the Spin for $1k (and decent cashes otherwise as well, though no satellites), another min-cash in the Spin in #7, and #8 which narrowly missed the Spin payout but fought its way into returning some money.

I think that’s a decent summary of the night. But that’s not the point of this post, really, as I know I don’t care when any of you min-cash or not, as luxurious a feeling as it sometimes is.

Today’s Primary Point: Breaking Down My Approach To The Slate

Now, I should note that I’m largely a hand-builder when it comes to NHL. In other sports I’m far more likely to set up basic rules and run teams in an optimizer to inform my process, but an optimizer for NHL is very hard to set up in the exact ways that I think about the lineups I want to build. I think I could become a max-entry bro, and have dabbled in the past, but ultimately I feel that the control over the correlations and lineup construction I exert is part of my theoretical edge. Giving that control up for the efficiency of an optimizer is something that I’ve toyed with that ultimately doesn’t feel right.

Knowing I had 8 lineups, there were a few main things I wanted to accomplish on Tuesday:

• I wanted to choose between EDM and COL. Playing both I felt would lead me to spreading my cheap exposures too thin or overexpose me to the cheap, thin, plays needed to fit those teams.

• I wanted heavy exposure to WPG-LA. As discussed on the pod, I was very high on all 3 of LA’s lines (though not Danault/Moore, didn’t think they had that in them..) and felt good about WPG1. This was a fantastic spot, in my view, with strong prices all around, several cheap values with great rates, and no overwhelmingly popular plays despite the values, presumably because of the volume of options.

• I wanted to play some Jonas Johansson: I was getting suspicious of Buffalo’s ownership coming in higher than “projections” thought they should. Since I’m not ready to give up my priors that Tampa, even without Vasi, is better than Buffalo, I felt that $7.6k goalie on a slate without any obvious cheap options was a good leverage spot.

• Lastly, just after 7PM, we received confirmation that Mayfield was out. I realized this likely locked Dobson into both his monopoly of the “offensive” role via the PP1, but probably raised his floor significantly and earned him some PK time over Bolduc/Aho. I made some post-lock edits to go from 2/8 Dobson shares to 4/8 to account for this, as he was an elite one-off play in my view.

There were several other thoughts I had, of course, but those were the primary ones that I was sketching out my lineup set and that generally informed my builds. Refer to the above screenshot, as I am now listing the lineups in the order I created them (not the order they are presented above).

#7 - I touted ARI3 as my favorite “sneaky” stack on Tuesday. It failed dramatically, with the three of Bjugstad, Maccelli, and Crouse combining for 4.3. But I simply felt better about playing McDavid/Drai against an up-tempo NSH team than I did about Mack/Mikko against a slow SEA team that has contained them as recently as last year’s playoffs. Fit in Dobson as a run back to ARI3, betting on NYI playing in a losing script (pre-any realization about his locked-in TOI for the night), with Talbot/Laferriere fitting perfectly well. Despite the ARI failure, this was an easy min-cash thanks to Draisaitl. 10/10, would build again, even with the knowledge that McD/Drai were on 16% of teams in the Spin while Mack/Mikko were stacked together on only 8%. NHL DFS Contests Dashboard | FantasyLabs

#5 - LA2 was my “preferred” LA stack, and I knew that was one place I wanted to stake my slate on. I ensured that one of my NY PP1 (Bo, Barzal, Dobson) stacks was with that line, and I was very surprised to see that three man NYI stack come in at 3% (3 of 28 total lineups with that trio were mine). Although I played them, I bought the Discord chatter that they were going to be popular and thus avoided the steam by not playing them with McDrai, despite the five players fitting well with several punts to choose from beyond that.

Because of the relatively low prices on these players (including Alex Laferriere), I was able to one-off Kaprizov, in a spot where I thought he could be the high scorer on the slate without bringing any teammate into “must have” territory due to the 11-7 set up and what we know about his linemates/PP mates. Before the final JEEK 5-1 goal, that was very much in the range of outcomes, but his 33 propelled this lineup to a deep cash anyway.

I had the money for Jack Campbell or Sorokin and felt that Campbell was fine, as Sorokin needed a high save shutout to kill me and I felt EDM-NSH would at least have pace (which it did, and Campbell erupted as a result despite a Sorokin SO). Ultimately, another team I was very happy with in retrospect, and some NYI flair would have helped dramatically, as I had the highest scoring NYI team in the contest and was 10 points clear of the next team down in 48th.

#4 - I wanted a WPG/LA gamestack, so I went LA1 + WPG1 with Morrissey for the full effect. I wanted a bit different of a texture, so LA1 got the nod here. Filling it out with a Faber one-off felt fine, given we knew MIN lost Goligoski in AM skate and would be playing with only 6D. Oettinger fit, so he goes. This lineup did nothing.

#8 - I originally built this one as a NYI1 COL2. Again with the idea that I was explicitly avoiding NYI1 EDM1 thinking that might be a 3v3 roulette wheel (which it was ultimately not…only 3 teams had Bo/Barz/McD/Drai, none of which had Bouchard or Dobson the way I would have gone), I wanted to get Makar in, with the idea that he has slate-breaking upside every night. With the COL line tweaks, I didn’t feel the lineup was that necessary to deploy RyJo and Lehkonen with an unstacked, not PP1 Nichu, so I pivoted RyJo - Nichu - Bjorkstrand to Necas - Teuvo - Bordeleau at 9:45 thinking that they could skate alongside Aho given last line’s closing lines, only to find out Necas - Teuvo were skating together with Aho out anyway (and now almost guaranteed to be on the PP1). This worked out perfectly well; and was a Good late swap in my book. A fine team with no ceiling outcomes that nearly min-cashed.

#3 - I mentioned Kaprizov before, and I didn’t feel great about Hartman/JEEK/Zucc at their prices on the slate. With so much uncertainty about who the “shooter” would now be sans Boldy, I played the other two PP1 guys (Addison and Johansson) with Kaprizov to save some $ while still betting on Kaprizov’s outrageous talent and matchup, opting to use my C spots on a mini PP stack in Kopitar and Dubois. These two would both benefit from an up-tempo game and could potentially link up on a PPG. I played Kempe to link the two more directly (as a plurality of LA PP shot attempts come from Kempe’s stick), slotted in Byfield and Makar as my final pieces, and moved on with Oett in net.

In retrospect, I regret playing Oettinger on this team, as now teams 3 and 4 of mine were effectively the same bet, on LA1, when I was coalescing my bets around LA2. Fiala/Laferriere with a more expensive G would have made me feel better, but it’s not a major mistake.

#6 - Kucherov and Sergachev (who was installed in the Stamkos PP spot in AM skate) with JoJo was how I wanted at least one of these teams to look. I felt Sergachev could benefit from the more-offensive role, as we know he has an incredible shots/blocks combo and was underpriced for a guaranteed PP1 job, regardless of matchup. After toying with a Tage/Dahlin bringback sans the goalie, I opted to leave Buffalo off my slate entirely, replacing them with NYI1 + Dobson + two of my favorite one-offs in Vilardi and Johansson. Alas, not many points to be found here in the Double Johansson stack squad. Maybe next time.

#1 - I wanted one more McDavid team, and after stacking him with ARI3 earlier I realized I had slightly more money than I realized to spread around the rest of my lineup. This probably should have been a bat signal to jam McDavid on each of these final two teams, but on this one I plugged in PLD and Laferriere, realizing that if I punted D + W I could still get up close to Fiala. Ultimately, I wasn’t comfortable with Blackwood in goal (who looked good for a while there..) and opted to play Kaliyev and Vilardi together, betting that WPG-LA turned into a gong-show and that the pace would get these players into some shot bonuses, rather than strictly correlating. Also, I wasn’t fully confident that Laferriere would stick the full game on L2 (he did), and capturing all of that production (with Kaliyev having skated there all offseason) was alluring once I decided that this was the team I wanted to play in the 11-man $691. In that contest, of course, you had to be far less “perfect” than in a larger field GPP, so I was happy with the choices. Grubauer in net didn’t go great, but I didn’t feel strongly about leaving money on the table for anyone in particular on the cheaper end. Had I known Nichushkin was L1 all day, I probably would have gone Talbot and Nichushkin - as I like Vilardi a lot but a one-off didn’t excite me - which is mildly frustrating but ultimately would have only swung ~$2k on the night.

#2 - Finally, I felt a little unbalanced on the LA side (especially with two Talbots in my set already) and wanted one more kick at the WPG can. WPG1 + Kaprizov + Makar sounded fun, and all I had to do was play Kaliyev as a bring back and a SJ 2-man mini that I was borderline considering over ARI3 anyway in Bordeleau stacking. Rutta was PP2 previously (though wasn’t last night) and has a locked in defensive/PK role, which against CAR is going to lead to the blocks bonus fairly often. I felt good about a PP2 mini perhaps getting me to a lucky point and Bordeleau’s pass-first teammates in Eklund and Hoffman (for his goal-scoring prowess, Hoffman has rather lackluster shot rates) getting him to a decent night. With Vilardi’s immediate injury, nothing came of this team either, but it capped off a lot of the “bets” I wanted to make on the night’s slate.

In summary, I executed on what I wanted to do on Tuesday night and made my money back — plus a little bit for my troubles.

The main mistake that I made process-wise was doubting my initial assessment that the pricing would “lose” NYI1 - I became increasingly worried that NYI could lead me to a place where I was not getting the differentiation from the field I wanted by playing the “chalk” EDM PP1 stack. This was unfounded, and every NYI piece came in <10% and far below what my “perceived optimal rate” would have been had I been forced to place a number on it. It’s improbable that it leads to a tournament takedown, given the sacrifices needed to fit EDM1 (only 33% of top 1% teams even played Draisaitl’s 40.5!), but perhaps an EDM NYI build would have been the golden ticket.

A minor mistake was playing two LA1 Oettinger squads, when neither was a bet I was looking to impose upon my lineup set.

A few odds & ends I observed in looking around the slate and how the field played:

• I was shocked to see Roman Josi at 2x the ownership of Cale Makar, despite only being $400 cheaper. I’m of the mind that Makar is a singular talent, and there will be several nights where he puts the slate away with his monster rates and point upside. Nothing against Josi, necessarily, but I’ll happily bet on Makar at lower ownership and similar prices when I trust his team far more to generate offense.

• Zach Benson and Casey Mittelstadt at ~10% was a major miss by the field. They have upside, certainly, but without a multi-point night both players are probably over 90% likely to absolutely detonate your lineups with very little reliable shot volume and no BS equity. What you win when you win with those guys is a fight with upwards of 50 other lineups for a solid cash, with several decent low-priced options on the slate. No thanks. Same with a 10% Tage in this matchup, but at least I get the upside exists and why some were seeing Tampa as an easy mark given their road struggles over the weekend.

• The Cheap Goalie crowd is growing. I don’t think we would have seen anything like this in the past, so your ways to save money and gain leverage over expensive teams/stacks are getting less leverage on the field itself as ownership rises on the bargain bin Gs. The next wave of DFS may be to embrace the variance in net and chase after some favorites (like Campbell), though I’ll use more than one flagship GPP before coming to that conclusion.