Good morning everyone and welcome to volume 47 of the Top Shelf Knucklepuck Stacks! We have a cash-playable 12-game slate on this cool and rainy (again) 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
On this massive slate, there many high-powered and up-tempo offenses that are in play and there are also three games that currently carry a moneyline of over 200. The Predators, Canadiens and Capitals are all at least -200 moneyline favorites. Of these three teams, the top stack is the Washington Capitals top line. Not only do the Caps have the highest implied goal total of the night (as of this writing), but they are also coming off a loss on Super Bowl Sunday to the Boston Bruins, a team they had not lost to in 14 previous contests, and they will out for revenge on a Canucks squad that is playing on back-to-back nights Your target here is Washington’s top line (Alex Ovechkin – Nicklas Backstrom – TJ Oshie) who will get a prime spot to shoot against a road team that has tired legs and is allowing the 11th-most high-danger scoring chances against.
Up next, you have to take a strong look at the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Sidney Crosby, Jake Guentzel and Bryan Rust line along with Kris Letang. Three of those four correlate on the power play with Phil Kessel and Patric Hornqvist slotting in for Rust. Pittsburgh has totaled the fourth most HDCF this season and should pummel the Hurricanes in a game that has an over/under of 6.5. I am aware of how strong Carolina’s offense has looked (and they do make for a contrarian play, look to the Sebastian Aho line), but I want a piece of Crosby’s line as they shoot against a weak goaltender at home in the Igloo.
Another stack that may go overlooked on a large slate is the Winnipeg Jets, but it is impossible to not see just how impressive the team’s first line (Mark Scheifele – Blake Wheeler – Kyle Connor) has been all season. Yes, Connor was away Scheifele and Wheeler part of the season but ramped into form as soon as he rejoined the line. The team is at home and will host a San Jose Sharks team that has won two in a row but have looked awful on the penalty kill and are still allowing the 10th-most high-danger scoring chances this season. Ultimately, you will want to attack the Sharks PK as it has surrendered seven goals on the man advantage in its last five contests.
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: Oilers 1 (Connor McDavid – Milan Luci – Ty Rattie), Blue Jackets 1 (Pierre-Luc Dubois – Cam Atkinson – Artemi Panarin), Sharks 1 (Logan Couture – Joe Pavelski – Timo Meier – Brent Burns), Sabres 1 (Jeff Skinner – Jack Eichel – Sam Reinhart – Rasmus Ristolainen), COL 1 (Carl Soderberg – Gabriel Landeskog – Mikko Rantanent), NSH 1 (Viktor Arvidsson – Ryan Johansen – Filip Forsberg)
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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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