Good morning everyone and welcome to volume 42 of the Top Shelf Knucklepuck Stacks! We have a cash-playable 12-game slate on this cool Thursday morning here in San Diego, California. I am finally back home where the where the weather is dreamy. I woke up today anxious yet excited for today’s slate. Was that a non-sequitur? Yep. That’s cool. You’ll keep reading.
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
If you play NHL DFS every day, I am not sure how you do not auto-lock Tampa Bay 2 into a lineup immediately. It’s unfathomable that some people still fade them just hoping and praying that they don’t go off. Some people made that mistake on Tuesday and we received yet another magical performance by Nikita Kucherov, Brayden Point, and Tyler Johnson. Well, Kucherov and Point are your primary targets and you can add Mikail Sergachev if you’d like. His puck handling skills that he showcased on Tuesday were superb. The team from Florida plays host to a Carolina Hurricanes team that has won five straight, but they have still been allowing plenty of shots and high-danger scoring chances. The team plays a high-event style of hockey and their recent wins came against far less talented offenses than the Lightning. Lock in TB2 and move on.
I have not written up this team the entire season as they have been dreadful, but I feel forced to write them up in this space today because they are at home hosting the Ottawa Senators. Yes, the Los Angeles Kings have been bad thus far. Maybe I should not write “bad”, but they have been disappointing. Nevertheless, the team is hosting the worst defensive club in hockey and we have a stackable opportunity. If you do want to take the risk and roster the Kings, you’re really only looking at the Anze Kopitar – Ilya Kovalchuk – Dustin Brown line. Kopitar has totaled 8 points in his last 10 with at least one point in four straight. Brown also has 8 points in his last 10. Don’t over look Drew Doughty as part of this stack as he is averaging nearly 2 blocks and 2 shots per game over his last 10 contests while seeing an average of 27.3 minutes of ice time.
The Toronto Maple Leafs will always be highly-owned any time they take the ice. I am aware that they have let us down in three of the last four games, but they are facing a New Jersey Devils team that has surrendered the sixth-most goals per game this season. I will be going back to the proverbial well tonight with the Leafs and my focus, since Toronto is on the road, will be the Auston Matthews line.
Other projected highly-owned stacks: Bruins 1 (Patrice Bergeron – Brad Marchand – David Pastrnak), Stars 1 (Tyler Seguin – Alexander Radulov – Jamie Benn with John Klingberg), and the Oilers 1 (Connor McDavid – Jujhar Khaira – Zack Kassian).
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 12-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.
Vegas is at home and the top six forwards looked great together on Tuesday. While I prefer the top line (Jonathan Marchessault – William Karlsson – Max Pacioretty), I would not be surprised if the second line (Brandon Pirri – Paul Stastny – Alex Tuch) hangs a few goals on the visiting San Jose Sharks. I envision Brent Burns and the boys out late last night in the City of Sin.
Other Notable Stacks: Panthers PP1/1 (Barkov – Huberdeau – Hoffman/Dadonov), Jets 1 (Scheifele – Wheeler – Kyle Connor), and Islanders 2 (Barzal – Beauvillier – Bailey)
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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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