Good morning everyone and welcome to volume 56 of the Top Shelf Knucklepuck Stacks! We have a cash-playable 7-game main slate on this cool and sunny Thursday morning in San Diego.
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
Let’s revisit what I wrote here on Tuesday – At the trade deadline, there was one team that dished away its crown jewels in order to build for the future. That team is the Ottawa Senators. The team has had a historically bad defensive season and matters get worse tonight, this time, at home against the Edmonton Oilers. The Oilers are playing on back-to-back nights after a getting beat down last night by Toronto. The visiting team’s top line (Connor McDavid – Leon Draisaitl – Sam Gagner – Oscar Klefbom) is in a good spot to pump in four goals against the decimated Senators.
On the other end of the rink, as bad as the Senators are, the Oilers have been terrible in their defensive end. Edmonton has surrendered the seventh-most goals against per game through 63 games and, if you want a deep, contrarian play, you can take a look at Ottawa’s top line (Brady Tkachuk – Colin White – Anthony Duclair), which is the only line that does not look like it consists of a bunch of AHL skaters. I like Duclair as a very cheap one-off play in cash. We know Duclair likes to shoot and now that he is on his team’s top line, he will do his best to shine.
Here’s another sentence that I can recycle from Tuesday that still applies today – We mentioned a team that stripped its key players a few paragraphs above, so let’s discuss a team that “won” the trade deadline. The Columbus Blue Jackets certainly came away looking the strongest after the trade deadline and its re-tooled first line rivals any other top line in the league. Its recently acquired player, Matt Duchene, is now centering Artemi Panarin and Cam Atkinson and their team is at home against a Philadelphia Flyers team that has allowed the fourth-most goals against per game this season on over 32 shots against per contest. I like the Blue Jackets’ top line to dominate as the skaters’ chemistry continues to develop.
Lastly, of the stacks that will see high ownership, I have to mention the Toronto Maple Leafs. The Leafs power play stack helped us win thousands of dollars last night and we are going to stack them again against the New York Islanders – John Tavares, Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, Andreas Johnsson, and Morgan Rielly.
Other Notable Stacks
The stacks I wrote about above are the ones that I project to be highly-owned. When I write “highly-owned”, on a 7-game slate that typically means ownership of about 25% in GPPs. The stacks above also tend to be expensive. So, you will need to use some of the below mentioned stacks as fillers or as one-off individual plays to complement your high-priced stacks.
Other stacks that you should have exposure to tonight are: Golden Knights 1 (Jonathan Marchessault – William Karlsson – Mark Stone), Lightning 2 (Brayden Point – Nikita Kucherov – Tyler Johnson – Victor Hedman), Flyers 2 (Oskar Lindblom – Sean Couturier – Jakub Voracek).
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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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Feel free to comment here or post a screenshot or photo on Instagram and remember to tag me @NotTonyM. I am always open to feedback and critique. Just remember, I respond to respect and love in whatever the message is that you want to share. Good luck!
