Good morning everyone and welcome to volume 55 of the Top Shelf Knucklepuck Stacks! We have a cash-playable 11-game main slate on this cool and sunny Tuesday 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
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 on the road against the defending Stanley Cup Champions. The Capitals have an implied goal total of 4.2 and are the heaviest Vegas moneyline favorites. The home team’s top line (Alexander Ovechkin – Evgeny Kuznetsov – Tom Wilson) is easily in a prime spot in what should be a high-event hockey contest againt a decimated Senators team.
The Carolina Hurricanes top line (Nino Niederreiter – Sebastian Aho – Justin Williams) has been sizzling lately and get to face a Los Angeles Kings team that has been experiencing on of its worst season’s in recent memory. Carolina has the best puck control numbers in the NHL while the visiting team sits in the bottom 10. Moreover, the home team is in the top 4 in high-danger scoring chances percentage numbers while Los Angeles sits in the bottom seven. With an implied goal total of 3.5, I expect Carolina to be highly-owned even on an 11-game slate, but you must have exposure here as the team has five goal upside.
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 Pittsburgh Penguins team that has allowed the third-most shots against per game this season and the 11th-most goals against. Clearly, Columbus is prime to make a championship push and it continues tonight at home.
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 11-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: Jets 1 (Blake Wheeler – Mark Scheifele – Kyle Connor), Golden Knights 1 (Jonathan Marchessault – William Karlsson – Mark Stone), Blues 1 (Ryan O’Reilly – Vladimir Tarasenko – Brayden Schenn), 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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