Triples Is Best

For the third time in four nights, a defenseman tallied a hat trick, triggering a win condition that could have catapulted you to the top on Tuesday night.

Triples is best. Triples makes it safe. Also, this is the stat I was waiting for. Awesome stuff in this silly league.

I should just watch I Think You Should Leave instead of do this shit. I’d be a whole lot happier. Maybe. Or I’d be similarly empty. Who knows!

There was a massive contest in the DraftKings lobby on Tuesday, the January Spin-O-Rama, with $400k in total prizes, $100k to first, and $360 entry fee. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite fill, though it was reduced rake rather than overlay.

There were a few big winners and lots to cover, so let’s dive in.

As a reminder, this is just a part of a series of these types of reviews: December’s $555 contest is here: https://moods.beehiiv.com/p/burning-the-midnight-oil-december-2025 I reviewed the $222 contest from November here: https://moods.beehiiv.com/p/lightning-struck-nov-2025 and October’s massive season-opener here: https://moods.beehiiv.com/p/nhl-dfs-tilt-n-hurl-october-2025.

two years ago threaded for your convenience here: https://x.com/FakeMoods/status/1853496293907161165

In 2024-25, I reviewed:

March $200K to first (!!): https://moods.beehiiv.com/p/a-barn-bash-at-the-donkey-palace

January’s $360 contest, in which Mike got hawked down late for the $100k top prize (but don’t worry, he still shipped a FHWC seat with that lineup): https://moods.beehiiv.com/p/2025-jan-360-spin-o-rama

MN Matt’s December $200k takedown in the $888: https://moods.beehiiv.com/p/2024-dec-888-abomnable-snowman

November’s $555 contest: https://moods.beehiiv.com/p/november-2024-barn-bash

October’s $360 contest: https://moods.beehiiv.com/p/2024-oct-spin-o-rama

This slate at a glance was pretty cool. MacKinnon and McDavid weren’t on the slate, and there were ten games all with no significant favorites. Per FantasyLabs Vegas tool, Minnesota (-205 at home) was the only favorite above -162 (Dallas), and the rest of the games were basically coinflips at -150 ML or closer. Similarly, 6 of these games were 6.5 totals, giving us lots of quality options to sort through. Utah played on Monday night, as had Boston, and while Boston seemed to get out of MSG unscathed (though they dropped the game in OT), we had major question marks on Utah as far as availability and injuries. There were three clear tiers in the rainbow chart, and while some of it aligned with Vegas totals, there were also some spots that looked to be under the radar. All in all, there was a lot more to consider than your average marquee slate.

You can read more about the rainbow chart here.

DJ and I did a full breakdown of the slate, going team by team (and discussing a lot more…) on the Morning Skate Podcast, which I would strongly encourage you having listened to if you want to hear my thoughts on most everything to do with these sixteen teams.

As far as news and notes heading into the day on Tuesday:

• Vancouver and San Jose were the classic late night hammer, offering a wunderkind to build Sharks stacks around and many cheap pieces on the Vancouver side, though it required AM skate on Tuesday to know for sure what Vancouver’s alignment would look like. Neither team is particularly good defensively, and the rainbow sheet put both teams in the top five of xG, with no clear warning signs from Corsi or Goals that there was anything too fishy afoot.

• Minnesota was the biggest favorite, hosting the new-look Chicago Blackhawks, and as such projected as some of the highest owned studs on the slate. With two quality lines and two outstanding quality defensemen (especially considering the defensive injuries), it was very easy to find a place to spend a lot of DK salary on Kaprizov, Boldy, JEEK, Hughes, etc..

• Florida hosted a b2b Utah squad, with the Panthers recently reaching full health (minus Barkov) with the return of Tkachuk and Marchand. They offered up three lines of quality forwards against a tired Utah team who I thought would be missing a key piece in Sean Durzi after he suffered a very late injury on Monday night.

• Toronto and Buffalo stood out to us on paper, though it was hard to really find any numbers to support the case, as an up-tempo affair. It looked fine overall, with the Sabres run of late combined with Toronto sputtering once again driving some interest. With Auston Matthews serving as the focal point of the Leafs offense, Buffalo looked like a natural pairing in a game-stack (ironic foreshadowing…)

• NSH-BOS, MTL-VGK, SEA-WSH, and LA-DET each had their own quirks that interested us: Boston loading up the top line, Vegas going full (unknown) blender after getting stomped this weekend, Washington doing who-the-fuck-knows-what with like five game-time decisions while Seattle has actually had a real top line for the first time it seems like ever, and LA-DET featuring very cheap players in elevated roles.

What I Played

Does it matter? Does it ever matter? I lost. I would have lost regardless.

• Throughout the day, it became clear that VAN-SJ was rightful chalk, and we had confirmation on VAN’s PP1 which included Filip Hronek (with no Buium) and Jonathan Lekkerimaki ($2.5k, no Boeser). There was no doubt about it, this was the game to keep in mind when building.

• I was a bit more surprised to see interest concentrate on Toronto, with Matthews and Morgan Rielly in particular looking like they’d be substantially more owned than I expected, given the other options in their respective price ranges.

• Everything else seemed like fair play, with the only real consideration being “if you play this stack with VAN or SJ, try to make sure you aren’t going too close to optimal to avoid duplication and 2v2 roulette” (at least in my opinion), especially on the MIN side.

• We got VGK lines with Smith to the top line with Eichel-Stone and Barbashev-Hertl, then had to wait until warmups for Dorofeyev-Marner-Bowman to hit our desks. Utah also came out for warmups before the slate locked, and we had just about all the info we were waiting for.

As far as what I played, there was a ton of uncertainty about the Capitals, with upwards of five players being possible GTDs. With the rainbow chart all-in on the Caps thanks to decent play, a good matchup with Seattle, and an especially high volume (Corsi) mark thanks to the way Seattle has been defending, I felt as if Chychrun was an absolute monster play to separate at defense, especially with the field locking in guys like Morgan Rielly and Filip Hronek (and John Klingberg, who we’ll get to) instead of spending up.

As we discussed with the Caps, there’s kind of a top line A (Strome + two of Ovi, Leonard, McMichael) and a top line B (Protas + Sourdif + Wilson) in Washington. Because Ovi was starting with Dowd, I was not super interested in PP stacking Washington, and the play of this line B has been unbelievable this year. The team has struggled on the whole, but these guys are absolutely clicking:

Priced at $15.9k on this slate, they had averaged 30 xFPPG (expected DK Pts, which I base on shot attempts, ixG, primary assists, and blocks) over the last ten, with just 25 actuals. The expecteds are about in line with my 2x rule of thumb, and the actuals were far behind, yet with this matchup, the way the line has played, and how perfectly it fit as part of a game stack of this game I was really happy with the play.

I paired this four-stack with a mini SEA stack, knowing that McCann was one of my favorite plays of the slate paired with a very cheap Matty Beniers who has actually been productive, is playing a lot, and is shooting a bit.

The big Utah news that dropped pre-game was not that Sean Durzi would miss, but that it was actually Dylan Guenther who was out in this one, replaced in the lineup by Kailer Yamamoto with McBain and Carcone. The way that I envisioned Florida rolling their three quality lines, Lundell would see L1, Bennett would see L2, and Reinhart-ERod-Verhaeghe would see L3 and Yamamoto. I loved the power play spot for Florida with their big guns back, and Reinhart is of course an intregral part of that attack, serving as the primary finisher. I didn’t see Samson as a must, but since I was even considering Guenther stuff a bit before he was ruled out, when the lineup worked with him as a one-off, I thought it was a clever idea with tons of upside and not much risk.

I thought Utah could either really push Florida and make them flex their muscles; or come out quite flat after dealing with an early Saturday game in Nashville, navigating the weather conditions in Tennessee on Sunday, playing a spirited effort in Tampa Monday, only to come away with a 2-0 shutout loss, and finally playing a b2b with injury and illness questions against a newly healthy Florida squad where Reinhart had an unbelievable advantage.

Finally, I had some inkling that it was defensive GTDs for Washington that were most likely to hit, so I weighed a 2v2 of Fehervary-Lankinen (or Dobes, who was possibly going to be my preference once I saw L2 Bowman) or JBD-Gibson. I dug around and ultimately felt strong about JBD, so why not grab the favored goalie against a Kings team that sucks out loud and profiled as one of the better goalie matchups on the night.

With Washington including Tom Wilson in their GTD mix, I also had a very clear plan to pivot to VAN-SJ if the situation presented itself. In for my late guys (with Samson, JBD, Gibson locking at 7PM), I could turn WSH1 3 + SEA1 mini into Macklin-Smith-Klingberg, Chytil-Lekkerimaki, which kept enough $ in UTIL for Chychrun to remain in my lineup. This variant fit to the dollar, but I didn’t like Lekkerimaki enough to go into the slate committed to him at ~10% owned. Chytil was definitely thin, and I preferred Sourdif for a similar price (and Beniers).

Results:

I lost. If there is an NHL slate that I can lose money at, I am fucking flying down the interstate racing to that exit. Even the Macklin version would have failed, because Detroit got stomped by the fucking Kings and the price on SJ would have meant SEA1 came out of my lineup anyway. Samson did absolutely nothing despite his line doing this to Utah (there was no hard match at play, which a lot of PP opportunities potentially prevented):

Only one game (BUF@TOR) cleared 7 goals, though 5 of them finished exactly on 7. The Sabres scored 7 on their own and allowed 4 to the Leafs, so that game was an early leader in the clubhouse, especially with Rasmus Dahlin’s hat trick at extremely low ownership.

The SJ-VAN game looks relatively tame, because it was… except every player had already gotten there six minutes into the game. It was 3-1 in the blink of an eye, and they made it 4 and 5 to 1 on PPGs later on, followed by the 20% Hronek hammer on the PP in the middle of the third. There were absolutely zero empty-calorie goals in this game, all of them came with significant ownership behind them.

Jared McCann was a victim of the weirdest play I think I’ve ever seen, and had a hat trick negated due to a high sticking penalty judged to have occurred 45 seconds before his goal. I cannot stress to you just how confusing this was in the moment, and I am still unclear as to how this can even happen. 45 seconds of game passed before a linesman decided to volunteer that there was a high sticking infraction, at which point the refs spent several minutes reviewing it before ruling that Jared McCann’s hat trick goal was no longer. However, the clock doesn’t reset, so an entire minute was just wiped of all stats. Only in the game that I game stack could this possibly fucking happen. McCann wasn’t enough to get me all that close to the cash line, hat trick or not, but my WSH line got their teeth kicked in by Chandler Stephenson, so I didn’t deserve to have a sweat anyway.

What Won:

Despite scoring 55 DK points, Rasmus Dahlin didn’t make the cut in the podium of the $360, in large part because of his 1.8% ownership in this contest. Also contributing was that Tage + Josh Doan were productive, but didn’t separate in the way that 29% Macklin or 9% McCann did, and there were a number of owned defensemen who put up good scores. Every other Sabre that you could have stacked with was not great, and the Matthews teams (with game stacked Dahlin) totaled… two, both of which also had John Tavares (6.3) and Morgan Rielly (1.5). Even though Matthews was in the same ballpark as Macklin, his stacking partners came nowhere close.

Your $100k winner is a fellow St. John’s University alum, CosaSpeciale, with a clean SEA1, SJ PP1 + Askarov, Parayko to close out team. Askarov was an impressive play given just how much ownership was scheduled to come in on Vancouver, and I am a bit irritated I didn’t land here, because I obviously loved SEA1 and am pretty on board the Macklin train, given his underlying expected DK point profile has recently elevated to match his actual production. Will Smith is a certified alpha. I don’t believe I was ever playing Toffoli with this build, but it makes total sense and I was even quite interested in John Klingberg. I could have made more money than $0, that’s for damn sure. Go Johnnies.

In second place was doucet58, which was good for $40k and a $20k FHWC seat in the $25 qualifier in the lobby on Tuesday. This team featured Beniers-McCann mini alongside the same SJ PP stack as Cosa minus Toffoli. This left much more room for activities, which was closed out with Caufield, Iafallo, and Hronek, who all got there as one-offs, with a Grubauer W. This result is pretty much the same with Lekkermaki over Alex Iafallo + a goalie in the 7.9k range (not Askarov, since Vancouver), but Iafallo without Connor-Scheifele is strange. I assume that’s a projection play, and there are $60k reasons to call me a fish for that take.

Finally, last marquee slate’s $100k winner bkreider managed a hotly contested 3rd place finish, with four rosters within 2.5 of his 181.9 score. This team left off Will Smith but played both Graf and Toffoli with Macklin-Klingberg and had SEA1 + Grubauer, leaving enough for an alpha D play in Mo Seider, who tallied 18 DKPts, all of which should have been Bernard-Docker’s ☹️ .

The 2v2 and 3v3 game around a Seattle + San Jose winner on a 10-game slate is pretty fucking disgusting, not gonna lie. I get it, but the first somewhat different team is in 6th place (Matthews-McMann + more punts rather than SEA1), the first non-Macklin team is 12th (EP40-DeBrusk-Willander with SEA1 and a Pastrnak-McAvoy mini), while Dahlin was first spotted in 13th, also from bkreider (VAN PP, BUF McLeod line + Dahlin, Pasta).

Congratulations to all the winners. I hate all of you equally.

Field Analysis:

• As mentioned above, there were 2 Matthews-Dahlin pairings, compared to 75 Matthews-Rielly pairings. This accounts for over half of Matthews teams in the contest, and anecdotally shows the power of game stacking in a game that soars over the total. I liked Rielly, but there were so many good defensemen that I was not getting to him with the 2nd highest ownership of the night (15.3%).

• Boston on a back-to-back was mega steamed, with the entire foursome of Geekie-Lindholm-Pasta and McAvoy checking in at 14-15% owned. 6.5% of the entire field played this four stack, which doesn’t really make sense to me. Less than that, 6.2%, played Macklin-Smith-Klingberg! Adding on a fourth piece reduced that ownerhsip greatly, and as someone who was pretty interested in the Nashville side, pretty much no one was out here correlating that BOS four stack with a depth NSH piece like Stamkos or Marchessault or a Josi play to try and capture a high upside game environment. On a slate like this, especially, I think getting into that game stack mentality was a +EV decision.

• Stacking into Vancouver at 20% owned was hardly punished, which really doesn’t seem fair. Elias Pettersson had two assists and the blocks bonus, so him not shooting and being horrible doesn’t matter. Hronek’s late PPG elevated him to useful, though Linus Karlsson dudded to keep that stack away from the top, even stacked with Macklin and friends.

• Minnesota somewhat snuck by the field, which I think was helped by very high prices without salary relief like stacking Pasta/Matthews/Macklin offered you. With a lot of value defensemen available plus Lekkerimaki checking in as a min-priced top six PP1 option, I liked the idea of something like Hughes with two or three of Kaprizov, Boldy, Eriksson Ek, and Zuccarello and treating guys like Hronek and JBD as viable UTIL plays (playing a 3D team with Quinn Hughes as the alpha spend). Minnesota fell completely flat in this spot, despite the highest team total by a significant margin, so it’s entirely elementary, yet that sort of build left a lot of outs versus the mid-tier SEA + SJ stuff if MIN were to score 5 or 6 rather than… 3.

• In net, the top four owned plays all get wins, accounting for 45% of the field’s ownership. You’ll never guess who the fifth-most owned guy was… that said, the lack of a separating score at the position meant that goalie didn’t matter much on Tuesday. As long as you got double digits, you were pretty much fine, as 18% Hellebuyck got a low-volume, 3 GA win for 13.7.

Another losing night on Tuesday, which is the status quo around these parts (and copied in from last month’s writeup…), but we’ll be back at it on Wednesday night live and Thursday on the pod feed for the Morning Skate Podcast. There is just one Friday game, so no Newsletter this week.

In case you are not a dedicated, loyal MSP listener (shame on you if so), we have a tentative plan for the Olympics, as well:

• I checked with my DK Rep and there is a plan for DK to launch DFS contests for the Men’s Olympic tournament. I am also confident that there will be player prop offerings for some, if not all, of the games on the sportsbook.

• The NHL season pauses after next Thursday, 2/5, and the first game of the Olympics is 2/11. This should mean that teams will arrive in Italy on Friday/Saturday, and first practices will hit our newswire on Sunday.

• Regardless of whether we get the info or not, I plan on posting a Newsletter Preview of the Olympics on Sunday, structured in a similar manner to my Friday writeups, with the team-by-team lineups featuring the full rosters and their statistics. I have ways to access a handful of the major leagues across the globe, so I will run through and gather those mid-season numbers in the coming days and hopefully be able to provide context not just on the NHL players, but even the lower level players on the Switzerlands and Germanys of the world. I may repost this Moodsletter on Tuesday, or I will update the original article as we get confirmed lines for each team, at least to start things off.

• On Monday evening, DJ and I will do a live MSP Olympic Preview on his YT Channel, which I will then post to the MSP Pod feed as normal. We will talk about each team, as well as any preliminary thoughts we have on anything that is being offered at that point in time (Sportsbook odds/props, DK contests, anything else that comes across our radars).

• From there, we’ll see what the offerings look like and what sort of interest there is from the community. With games generally starting very early in the AM, the content around daily Olympics action will probably be impossible. Maybe we’ll pivot to breathlessly reviewing Heated Rivalry instead…

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this recap, 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.