Post-Slate Reflections - 11/7 Election Night NHL GPPs on DraftKings

With the NBA on pause for social activism causes surrounding Election Night, the NHL took center stage on Tuesday, leading to DraftKings offering up a $500k total prize pool contest at the $444 buy-in level and $200k in the $20, $100k and $50k to first respectively. Let’s take a look at how I played, what won (not me, sadly), and how I could have played with perfect knowledge.

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

Unlike the previous $360, my satellite woes the past two weeks limited me to one ticket to the $444, and thus with a $123 FHWC ticket as well I opted to just play one lineup on the main slate.

I also played a late slate team but the contest was less interesting than last time, so here’s what I played but I won’t spend much time on it.

All-in-all, I hate whiffing on these major chances to define a season, but with my ticket-collecting struggles heading into the slate this wasn’t quite the same as my ~$4k entry fee total in the last breakdown. Nonetheless, I think it’s still useful to analyze the decisions leading up to lock (and after!) and consider what I could have done with 8-10 entries (note, this almost certainly does not involve “winning” based on what transpired).

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

Right off the bat, having one team is always going to be a different feeling than having eight like last time. On slates with 20 teams to pick from, this necessitates difficult decisions.

I tend to start my slates through the defensemen. I’ve always been reluctant to spend down at D while the field flocks to that strategy, since I really want to have 25 points in my range of outcomes at each spot for any sort of top-heavy contest, even smaller fields. For forwards, it’s not hard to see a 2-goal game coming from anyone, vs. on defense those punt options are far more likely to score ~10, but less likely to really turn into a difference-maker.

I like to believe one of my main “soft skills” in NHL DFS is assessing whether this upper-echelon D production in particular is accrued via repeatable methods (i.e., the defenseman is a focal point of the offense/PP unit or a passenger) and setting ranges on salary/ownership in my head based on those beliefs.

Like all things, this tendency to spend up at D is not a hard and fast rule of mine and very much depends on the slate, but it’s my preference. As such, I started by analyzing the D position before I made any decisions about forward stacks.

One key mispricing on the slate was Erik Gustafsson for the Rangers, playing in the top four and on the PP1 with no Adam Fox, priced at only $3.7k. He’s always been useful in DFS contests whenever the role was set to increase, as it did on Saturday with the pricing carrying into Tuesday as well, so any team had to be compared to the alternative of “what if I played Gustafsson as one of the D slots?”

Otherwise, I felt Erik Karlsson was priced too low at $6.5k, and Cale Makar at $7.5k was also immediately of interest to me. Both of these players, on a low scoring night, could easily put up 30 without their higher-priced teammates dominating them. Additionally, these high-end D are almost always lower owned than those same teammates, play more minutes, and are viable one-offs if looking for exposure to high-total teams given how defenders mix around the lineup during 5v5 play.

As I moved to forward, I knew that I felt more comfortable spending down at the position than most, for a variety of reasons, and thus largely ignored the high-priced TB, COL, and PIT stacks off the bat. Using OccupyFantasy data, here’s a quick overview of each team’s First Power Play Unit and how the five players profiled as far as cost (DK Salary), projection (via OF Index, which takes cost and ownership into account unlike other “raw” projections), and ownership.

All numbers are totaled, meaning that COL PP1 projected for 53% owned in totality. This number wound up being 48% when the cards flipped over, for reference.

Of course, most PP1 units involve a defenseman, so this is merely an attempt to process the several competing thoughts I had in looking for what I felt would be the best lineup for Tuesday night’s action. A few scattered thoughts before I narrowed down.

• COL/PIT/TB were all expensive, and all came in with considerable ownership.

• San Jose was getting more ownership than I was expecting (and I had heard them mentioned on every show I tuned into), while my interest was rather limited to two players. Stacking SJ into ownership was out of the question.

• Seattle is cheap, but Seattle hardly has a PP1, so while not shown here, there wasn’t much I liked about Seattle even at next to no ownership.

• With the first bullet all but necessitating choosing between San Jose or Seattle (or dipping to 3rd lines/non-featured players) or punting both defense spots, I pretty quickly moved away from those three high-end teams.

• Philadelphia had some higher priced options (Konecny, Sanheim) and some mid-priced ones (Atkinson, Couturier, Tippett), even offering a low-priced Foerster as well. I’m always going to fade bad teams against worse teams on the road with substantial ownership. It didn’t help that we had no set PP1 unit (and as it turned out, incorrect 5v5 lines to boot.. thanks Torts) to feel confident in how PHI correlation would work if they did manage to score 6-7 goals and continue the Sharks’ misery.

• Since you could fit PHI1 in particular (which was supposed to be Tippett-Couts-Atkinson) with just about any two players you wanted, it was pretty obvious that Point/Kucherov and Mack/Rant plus PHI1 would be relatively common, and with one cheap D (Gustafsson) figured out, we’d be playing a 3v3 lottery (UTIL/D/G) with dozens/hundreds of my best friends to determine the winner of the slate if that combo hit. In a spot where I had 5+ lineups, I may have played my best hand into that lotto since I felt like I had a good read on a nice punt option or two, but that was out of the question.

Those thoughts/beliefs pushed me toward this middle mess of a consideration set. With the top three out, I quickly moved on from Buffalo against a tight-checking CAR squad, and found that virtually every team’s PP1 profiled rather similarly, with MIN PP1 to NYI PP1 totaling just $2k in salary different from one another and nine other teams sandwiched in between them. This is where I thought the golden ticket lay in wait, if I could crack the code.

• MIN and WPG had the best OF Index total of the 11 teams (10 if excluding PHI) in this range. I liked MIN in particular because if I were to spend up on D, there was nobody correlated with MIN1 (the preferred way to go) who could challenge my lineup’s defenders, as MIN was rolling a 5F PP1 and rarely have major scores from D anyway. The downside was that NYI was confirmed to be getting back Adam Pelech, meaning for literally the first time all season they were going to ice their full set of six defenders. For a team that has struggled with xGs but rarely gets punished due to excellent goaltending (Sorokin the star here, but Varlamov has been very good as well), I didn’t feel great about attacking the lowest total game of the night and a defense that I have a lot of respect for. Bo Horvat’s injury did not move the needle for me, as he’s never been a defensive stalwart and if anything, this slowed the game down in my book as Barzal would have less firepower alongside him.

• Oh, I did also mention WPG had the best OF Index in this range, didn’t I… huh, I wonder how that turned out.

• NYR was strongly considered, as was Calgary. I loved the three PP1 defensemen on offer, and nearly settled on a team of Trocheck-Panarin-Gus, Kadri-Weegar-Rasmus Andersson.. but then moved on because Zary was a C and not a W (and I didn’t want to play Sharangovich instead. Oops!), and nothing else came together quite how I would have liked it to.

• NJ was the other team from this group that I spent time sketching out lineups to include, everyone else was a relative non-starter other than one-off considerations. Ultimately, with 20 teams to pick from, Michael McLeod was not happening and Palat-Mercer-Timo was extremely attractive to me but only with Makar.

Circling back to CGY, I then pondered different combinations of CGY PP1 before realizing that I really, really liked the feel of CGY PP1 as a whole. As in, all five. Including Jonathan Huberdeau. Since you’ve already seen my lineup, you know exactly what I did. Elias Lindholm had a reasonable projection, and Huberdeau at $4.6k is far too cheap for his theoretical upside as an orchestrator of the PP1.

Even though some initial digging into this noted a drop from a mid-70s IPP on the PP in FLA to a mere 50% (think to yourself, is Alex Tuch the “orchestrator” of the BUF PP1?) in his ~90 games with the Flames, the Kadri-Weegar-Andersson was growing on me at extremely low ownership and high floors and I thought Huberdeau could be the piece that unlocked significant upside while also providing salary relief. Elias Lindholm playing 21 minutes in a winning matchup also made sense as a correlated piece, so away I went. Without any slam-dunk matchups, and only MacKinnon playing among the handful of A++ fantasy producers in the nightly $9k range, I felt that a full PP onslaught was a good way to bet on correlation winning the night without too much risk of a single player putting up a “had to have it” score at the high-end.

From there, I considered Gustafsson in a 3D build, but had no room for Trocheck with 2 CGY centers, who I felt was the biggest benefactor of Chytil’s injury. I finally came back to my Hertl-MacDonald PP1 block for San Jose, where I discussed on the podcast how Hertl was almostly certainly going to be involved in a SJ win (he’d gotten points on HALF of the team’s goals to that point, 6 points in 11 games on a team with 12 goals. Unbelievable) and how Jacob MacDonald moving to that PP1 (and L3 as opposed to L4) created a ton of upside in both TOI and points on top of his very strong shot rate and the newfound PP involvement he flashed on Saturday. Adding in BUF goalie gave me room for Kyle Connor and Georgiev gave me room for Jordan Kyrou. I sided with Kyrou given my sick affinity for Torey Krug and friends coming off Kyrou’s 39-point night on Saturday and a rekindling of a true STL PP1; plus what I thought could be a toothless NJ attack reliant on a heavy dose of Dougie point shots.

Results: CGY gets stymied for 2 periods, Huberdeau gets benched to spark their comeback… Jacob MacDonald gets surprise-scratched just before 10:30 EST lock and I pivot to 2nd line Kevin Labanc (had I known Labanc was L2, I may have considered a COL PP1 SJ2 team, but alas)… Hertl gets held off the scoresheet as SJ explodes for two goals in their first win of the season… Georgiev coasts to a win and sees only 23 shots despite a penalty-filled mess of a game, including a NJ 7-minute PP opportunity in the second period.

What Won: The $444 was won by PetrGibbons, with WPG1 + Morrissey + Helle, Stamkos + Paul + Cernak, Tolvanen one-off… The $123 FHWC Q was won by Whistles with full WPG PP1, a Duclair-Granlund mini-stack, and Josi-Saros as the final two (well-correlated, imo) pieces in... The $20 was won by joeflanagan9 with WPG1 + Morrissey, CGY2, Dougie + Blackwood.

That WPG1 won is not a surprise based on the night they collectively had, highlighted by four assists for Alex Iafallo. In case you were curious, in a 432-game NHL career, Tuesday night was the first instance he had even 3 assists in a game and was his first 4-point night ever. $5.2k, you say? Alrighty then. Unfortunately, he’s had two stretches where he had 4 points over two games, or else then I’d be really tilted about it.

It’s somewhat comforting that the PP1 onslaught worked for Whistles, because it’s a scarily similar build (SJ 2-man, PP1, high-end one-off) with massively different results. We even built around the same three games!

My one retrospective is that CGY2 + the D (or even just one of them and moving up to Makar/EK65) made a lot of sense as well, since Sharangovich is well-liked by the coaching staff and kills penalties, and C was relatively weak outside of the handful of extremely expensive options. I considered Zary/Kadri together because of how obnoxiously inexpensive Kadri was, but never CGY2 in full, and should consider swallowing my pride next time rather than letting the fancy MacDonald play seep in to how I view the punt options. It’s Jacob MacDonald, for fuck’s sake. I’m not playing WPG1 with that, and I’m not sure I could have fit Mack/Rant/Makar with that line without further sacrificing, but it’s a good lesson in how players with locked-in roles (like Sharangovich and Iafallo) that directly correlate with good players are pretty strong bets if those high-end pieces like Connor and Kadri hit.

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

• Tony DeAngelo was on my radar at $3.6k as a direct pivot off of Gustafsson. He scored, and wound up similar to Gus anyway, but 12% (to Gus’s 24%) was a surprise, I assumed he’d sit around 5% or lower. I’d rather have Gus, knowing that, and worth considering next time there’s a “can’t miss” play with an obvious leverage option.. the field might be leveling here.

• Montreal’s ownership shocked me. 14% for Cole Caufield at $6.9k against a b2b Tampa team is one thing, but 10% Suzuki, 9% Matheson, and 7% Josh Anderson is an entirely different animal. The field was either reacting too much to the only b2b team of the night, to a goalie, or to Tampa’s season-long underlying numbers being weak on defense. I didn’t really see it as viable. If you played those players, you couldn’t even game-stack TB with Caufield unless going to TB2, which involved a huge sacrifice.

• 25% Saros was the chalk goalie of the night. It kind of worked, as he hit the bonus, but 25% on any goalie is always absurd with this many options, so you’re just hoping the rest of your team is good enough to win. A real shame the CGY PP was toothless and couldn’t put the dagger in Saros earlier than the 3rd period and win me some money.