Good morning everyone and welcome to volume 64 of the Top Shelf Knucklepuck Stacks! We have a cash-playable 8-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 seeing the Edmonton Oilers dismantle the Los Angeles Kings on Tuesday night, I expect the ownership on the home team against the Dallas Stars to be through the roof tonight. One reason I expect this to be the case is because Anton Khudobin will be in net after Ben Bishop was knocked out of the game following another injury last night. Khudobin has actually been decent this year, but I still want a major piece of the Oilers top line (Connor McDavid – Leon Draisaitl – Zack Kassian with either Darnell Nurse or Oscar Klefbom) in my GPP lineups. After all, maybe we get another double hat trick tonight from our stack. That said, don’t overlook Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.
The Chicago Blackhawks are on the road against a seemingly tough San Jose Sharks team, but the fact of the matter is that the team’s forwards are have been bad in their own defensive zone and the goaltending combo of Martin Jones and Aaron Dell has not been working out as of late. Fire up the Hawks top line (Jonathan Toews – Alex DeBrincat – Patrick Kane) opposite San Jose that is currently riding a six game losing streak..
We were on both sides of the Ottawa Senators and Buffalo Sabres game on Tuesday, which was only half correct. I thought that the Senators was the sneaky play because the Sabres goaltending and defense had been bad. However, it was only the Senators who showed up and Craig Anderson magically pitched a shutout against Jack Eichel and company. Tonight, the Sabres are at home and are hosting another team that that limped through the season with just a handful of bright spots. The Detroit Red Wings are visiting Buffalo and Taro Hirose has been one of the most recent bright spots for the road team. The youngster has played just four games in the NHL and he has recorded at least one assist in each of those games. On the road, I think the Wings second line is the sneaky play tonight – Andreas Athanasiou – Taro Hirose – Luke Glendening.
That said, do I think the Sabres top line (Jack Eichel – Alexander Nylander – Conor Sheary) is in play as the Red Wings are surrendering the fourth-most goals against on the sixth-most shots against.
Don’t overlook the Winnipeg Jets first line or second line today (Kevin Hayes – Patrik Laine – Kyle Connor).
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 an 8-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: Capitals 1 (Nicklas Backstrom – Alexander Ovechkin – Tom Wilson – John Carlson), Panthers 1 (Aleksander Barkov – Evgenii Dadonov – Jonathan Huberdeau), Hurricanes 1 (Sebastian Aho – Nino Niederreiter – Justin Williams – Jaccob Slavin), Stars 1 (Tyler Seguin – Alexander Radulov – Jamie Benn – John Klingberg), Canucks 2 (Elias Pettersson – Brock Boeser – Sven Baertschi).
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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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