Good morning everyone and welcome to volume 57 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.
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
Over the rest of the season, the first thing you should do each day is to see if the Ottawa Senators are playing. If the answer is yes, you take a look at the team they are facing and stack that team. Tonight, the lucky team that wins the “Who Gets to Play the Senators” game is the New York Islanders. As we have discussed here in this space over the past few weeks, the Senators traded away their crown jewels and a historically bad team miraculously got worse. The top six forwards on the Islanders are in play, but if I had to pick one line, I’m going with the second trio (Mathew Barzal – Anthony Beauvillier – Josh Bailey). You should also have exposure to Anders Lee – Brock Nelson – Jordan Eberle. The second line has been more consistent over the course of the season and should dominate a Senators team that is dead last or nearly dead last in all major defensive metrics.
The Tampa Bay Lightning had their incredible win streak stopped a few nights ago at the hands of my Boston Bruins, but got right back up on the wagon thanks to the atrocious Ottawa Senators. With that win, the Lightning became the fastest team in the history of the NHL to hit 50 wins. Suffice it to say that the team is having an incredible season and they are playing in a game tonight at home against the Winnipeg Jets who have been allowing over 40 shots against in four of its last seven contests. The team has also struggled in killing off penalties as they have surrendered four power play goals against in its last three games. Fire up Tampa Bay’s second even strength line (Brayden Point – Nikita Kucherov – Tyler Johnson) or its top power play unit (add Steven Stamkos and Victor Hedman in play of Johnson).
The Columbus Blue Jackets have the third highest implied goal total this evening and are on the road in New Jersey against a struggling Devils squad. In fact, the Devils have the third-worst puck control numbers and, with four consecutive losses, they appear prime to be attacked by the Blue Jackets top line (Pierre-Luc Dubois, Cam Atkinson – Artemi Panarin – Seth Jones), who need an lazy team to shake off their two recent losses.
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: Penguins 1 (Sidney Crosby – Jake Guentzel – Jared McCann), Avalanche 1 (Nathan MacKinnon – Alexander Kerfoot – Mikko Rantanen), Predators 1 (Ryan Johansen – Viktor Arvidsson – Filip Forsberg), Jets 1 (Mark Scheifele – Blake Wheeler – Patrik Laine).
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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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Feel free to comment here or post a screenshot or photo on Instagram and remember to tag me @NotTonyM. I am always open to feedback and critique. Just remember, I respond to respect and love in whatever the message is that you want to share. Good luck!
