Good morning everyone and welcome to volume 59 of the Top Shelf Knucklepuck Stacks! We have a cash-playable 8-game main slate on this cool and sunny Tuesday morning in Sunnyvale, California (aka Silicon Valley).
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
I have had a love affair with the Winnipeg Jets this season. The team’s top line (Mark Scheifele – Blake Wheeler – Patrik Laine – Jacob Trouba) continues to play exceptionally well together and they will face the San Jose Sharks at home in the game with the highest over/under of the night. Blake Wheeler is cranking on all cylinders (15 points last 10 games) and is the forward that is leading the scoring as of late with Laine right behind him (9 points last 10 games). What has been so impressive this season is that even with Dustin Byfuglien out for much of the year, the Jets continue to pump out an outstanding corps of defensemen. For example, take a look at Jacob Trouba who not only has a safe floor based on his peripheral statistics alone (21 SOG, 16 BS last 10 games) but he is also an offensive force (9 points last 10 games).
In the same game, you should also have exposure to the San Jose Sharks in that same contest as their game with the Jets does have the highest over/under. Your target here should be the road squad’s top line (Logan Couture – Joe Pavelski – Timo Meier – Brent Burns). As great as the Jets offense has been on this season, their style of play opens up wide shooting lanes for opposing teams as indicated by the fact that they are allowing the third-most shots against per contest.
It is hard to overlook the fact that the Dallas Stars first line (Tyler Seguin – Alexander Radulov – Roope Hintz – John Klingberg) has finally been playing good hockey. It took the line far too long into the season and it took far too many line experiments (i.e., Jamie Benn has been away from Seguin for much of the year), but it appears as though chemistry among Seguin, Radulov and Hintz is growing stronger with each passing game. The Stars are on the road against a Jack Eichel-less Buffalo Sabres team and I am excited to watch the visiting team’s offense light up the home team that is allowing the seventh-most shots per game and the 9th-most goals per game.
On an 8-game slate, which is smaller than usual for a Tuesday, we will see inflated ownership on the stacks mentioned above. With the inflated ownership, we may be able to get exposure to the Pittsburgh Penguins top line (Sidney Crosby – Jake Guentzel – Jared McCann) at relatively lower-than-normal owernship percentages. This season Crosby has logged five points and 16 shots on goal in just three games opposite the Washington Capitals this season. As solid as the team is as a whole, the Caps have allowed over three goals against and 32 shots against per contest this season. Moreover, the visiting team is surprisingly 11th-worst in puck control numbers through 69 games. Crosby’s price is high but so is his floor and his ceiling is through the roof.
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: Blue Jackets 1 (Pierre-Luc Dubois – Cam Atkinson – Artemi Panarin), Flames 1 (Sean Monahan – Johnny Gaudreau – Elias Lindholm), Predators 1 (Ryan Johansen – Viktor Arvidsson – Mikael Granlund), Capitals 1 (Evgeny Kuznetsov – Alex Ovechkin – Tom Wilson).
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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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