Good morning everyone and welcome to volume 33 of the Top Shelf Knucklepuck Stacks! We have a cash-playable 9-game slate on this sunny and cool Saturday morning here in San Diego, California. I am headed to do some family things today. Life is grand! Thanks for all of your support this season thus far. As always, much love and respect!
If you are a new subscriber to our NHL Core Plays, please make sure that you are playing all of the lineups that I post on any given day. NHL is such a highly-variant sport and there is truly no telling which lineup will go off. I do have my favorites each day, but even the lineups that I may not think have massive upside sometimes, in fact, have the upside you need to take down a tournament.
Top Stacks
The Ottawa Senators are playing on back-to-back nights on the road in Montreal. This is the third time that these teams will have met this month and the over hit in the other two games with Montreal taking both wins at a clip of 5-2. I expect a similar result tonight as the visiting team will start Mike McKenna in net. We know how bad the Senators are defensively and McKenna has a GAA on the season of 3.98 so you are going to light him up with the Canadiens skaters. The Habs first line is the one that you want to stack at home so take a hard look at Max Domi – Jonathan Drouin – Andrew Shaw with Shea Weber as an add-on.
You will want exposure to the Columbus Blue Jackets at home against the visiting Anaheim Ducks who have the fourth-worst puck control numbers and are allowing the second-most shots against. They are second only to the Ottawa Senators team I wrote about above. While I have a strong affinity for the Jackets, they are facing a rested Ducks squad that has dropped only two of its last 10 games and John Gibson has been seeing the puck well. Pierre-Luc Dubois, Cam Atkinson and Artemi Panarin with Seth Jones as your add-on blueliner have developed fantastic chemistry together so make sure you build stacks around this Columbus core four.
The other two stacks that rate the highest according to my model are the Colorado Avalanche top line (Nathan MacKinnon – Gabriel Landeskog – Mikko Rantanen) and the Washington Capitals top line (Nicklas Backstrom – Alexander Ovechkin – TJ Oshie, John Carlson add-on). In the case of the defending Stanley Cup Champions, they host a Buffalo Sabres team that is allowing the seventh-most shots against and has the tenth-worst CF%. With Ovie on a heater now, even though the team played last night, I am on this stack again this evening. As for the Avalanche, they also played last night and are hosting a Dallas Stars team that has the third-worst CF% and have dropped three in a row. They are also playing their last game on a current road trip. I see the Avs hanging four tonight.
Other Notable Stacks
Dylan Larkin has been too good lately and I love him skating with Justin Abdelkader and Gustav Nyquist. You should have exposure to the Red Wings top line on the road in Brooklyn. In the same game, go ahead and stack the Islanders’ Brock Nelson line.
My favorite sneaky stack of the night is the Vancouver Canucks. My focus is on the team’s “second” line featuring Elias Pettersson, Josh Leivo, and Brock Boeser.
I would be silly to not also roster these other stacks: Penguins 1/PP1 and Panthers 1 / PP1.
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There were some questions in the Slack chat over the first month of the season about how to find the lines that I list as my top stacks on the Top Shelf Knucklepuck Cheat Sheet. Head over to either DailyFaceoff.com or LeftWingLock.com to see which skaters are on each of a team’s lines and then build your line stacks. For example, if you see that my top stack of the day is “PIT PP1 / 1”, look at one of the two sites listed above and you will see that the top power play unit of the Pittsburgh Penguins consists of Patric Hornqvist – Evgeni Malkin – Sidney Crosby – Kris Letang – Phil Kessel. The team’s top line features Jake Guentzel – Sidney Crosby – Patric Hornqvist. I decided to leave off the players’ names from the line stacks because of the fact that they may change before the game or after the team’s morning skate (if applicable). Both sites I mentioned are updated regularly and typically accurate. If you’re ever lost, just ask questions in our Slack chat.
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