Good morning everyone and welcome to volume 62 of the Top Shelf Knucklepuck Stacks! We have a cash-playable 12-game main slate on this cool and sunny Thursday morning in San Diego, California.
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
After 7-4 thrashing at the hands of the Vancouver Canucks yesterday, the Ottawa Senators are back in action this evening and had to travel to Calgary overnight. The Flames are heavy -430 money line favorites (one of the two largest spreads this season) and we are going to have exposure to the home team against the visiting squad. Sean Monahan didn’t play on Tuesday and Derek Ryan slotted in nicely for him skating alongside Johnny Gaudreau and Elias Lindholm. Whether or not Monahan is a go tonight, the Flames first line is your top stack on the day against a Senators squad that is a shell of even its former awful self prior to dealing its Crown Jewels at the trade deadline.
After a slow and ugly start to March from a defensive perspective, the Boston Bruins have snapped out of the funk and have only allowed one goal over its last two straight wins. Additionally, David Pastrnak has returned to the lineup and was reunited with Brad Marchand and Patrice Bergeron. The team heads to the swamp lands tonight to face a New Jersey Devils team that has lost two in a row and is now surrendering the third-most goals in the league. The home team also owns the third worst puck control numbers. As such, fire up the road team’s first line as Boston continues to heat up for a playoff push.
The Detroit Red Wings have the fifth-worst CorsiFor% and are giving up the fourth-most goals against per game. Tonight, the team heads to St. Louis to face a Blues squad that has the second highest implied goal total. The third line of Oskar Sundqvist, Jaden Schwartz and David Perron is interesting, but your target should be the top line featuring Ryan O’Reily, Brayden Schenn and Vladimir Tarasenko. The top trio has had a disappointing and injured-plagued season, but we are rolling them out against a poor defensive team in the Wings.
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.
Other stacks that you should have exposure to tonight are: Sharks 1 (Logan Couture – Timo Meier – Joe Pavelski), Predators 1 (Ryan Johansen – Filip Forsberg – Viktor Arvidsson), Lightning 2 (Brayden Point – Nikita Kucherov – Tyler Johnson), Stars 1 (Tyler Seguin – Alexander Radulov – Mattias Janmark), Oilers 1 (Connor McDavid – Leon Draisaitl – Zack Kassian).
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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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