Good morning everyone and welcome to volume 61 of the Top Shelf Knucklepuck Stacks! We have a cash-playable 10-game main slate on this cool and sunny Tuesday 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
With the Ottawa Senators not in action tonight, we want to find another team that is in the midst of a downward spiral. That team is the New Jersey Devils and they have won just two of their last 10 and are now allowing the fourth-most goals against per game this season. The team from the last of swamps may be at home, but we will still attack them with the Washington Capitals top line (Evgeny Kuznetsov – Alex Ovechkin – Tom Wilson), which has been one of the most consistent lines this season. If it makes you feel even more confident, note that the Devils have the third-worst puck control numbers in the league.
Next up, we are stacking the Nashville Predators top line (Ryan Johansen – Viktor Arvidsson – Filip Forsberg) at home against the visiting Toronto Maple Leafs. While I want a piece of Toronto’s offense (see below), I want a major piece of the Preds offense to attack the team that was thrashed in Ottawa a few nights ago. We have written about how much we love the Leafs offense but want to attack their open style of play all season so we will do that tonight. The Predators top line has not had a whole lot of time together this season due to injuries, but when they are, their chemistry is fantastic. Note that the Leafs are allowing the eighth-most shots against per game.
The St. Louis Blues and their fans will do their best to forget this down season. The one highlight this year has been Jordan Binnington. The offense has been lackluster. Nevertheless, with the Edmonton Oilers (3.26 GA/GP) in town, you will want to have some exposure to the Blues first line (Ryan O’Reilly, Brayden Schenn – David Perron – Alex Pietrangelo). With bottom ten puck control numbers and high-danger scoring chances allowed, the Oilers are prime to pick on.
In addition to the notable stacks below, also consider the Stars top line and Flyers top line.
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 10-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), Wild 1 (Eric Staal – Zach Parise – Jason Zucker – Ryan Suter), Blue Jackets 1 (Pierre-Luc Dubois – Artemi Panarin – Cam Atkinson – Seth Jones), Hurricanes 1 (Sebastian Aho – Justin Williams – Nino Niederreiter), Panthers 1 (Aleksander Barkov – Jonathan Huberdeau – Evgenii Dadonov).
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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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