It’s currently the fantasy hockey playoffs for anyone who plays in a head-to-head format, also known as the most anxiety riddled time of year for fantasy hockey managers. One wrong start/sit decision could be the difference between hoisting the championship trophy and shameful second place. If you’re in a tight match-up and you find yourself down to your last add of the week, there’s only one thing left to do: swing for the fences and go for the gold with a goalie.

Whether you’re in a points league or a categories league, one goalie start can change an entire match-up. In a categories league, this is a little bit more straight forward. You can get the win or saves to put you over the top, or if you haven’t started many goalies that week, it can drastically change your save percentage. In a points league, getting a shutout from a goalie can give you the same points or better than a skater who has a three-point game.

So we need to find the perfect goalie from the waiver wire that can put us over the top in our fantasy hockey match-up, but where do we even begin our search? We begin at Frozen Tools, of course. Starting at the Frozen Tools homepage, I start looking over each team’s hot and cold players. I may not be a smart man, but I certainly appreciate the simple hot and cold symbols at a quick glance for each team as a simple barometer to start my search of teams that I may want my goalie to start against. And this certainly caught my eye.

A big fat "None" under the hot players may not tell the whole story of a team, but it’s a good place to start. So in addition to the Montreal Canadiens, the Nashville Predators and New Jersey Devils all not having any hot players, I also found on the Frozen Tools homepage that the Philadelphia Flyers and the Columbus Blue Jackets were showing as ice cold with no hot players. In addition, I also jotted down the Anaheim Ducks, the Detroit Red Wings, and the San Jose Sharks as they all only had one hot player a piece. I had found my initial targets.

Next, I headed to the new handy dandy Schedule Planner 2.0 in Frozen Tools which basically is your one-stop shop for all your scheduling needs. You can sort it however you want with a nice basic schedule layout of the games by day, the opponent, if it’s a home or away game, etc. And what I really like about it is that the Schedule Planner allows you to pick a custom date range. For my purposes here, I only want to go out to the end of this week, but I don’t care about the games earlier in the week. So I selected a range of Thursday through Sunday, because even though the games on Thursday have already happened, I want to make sure if they’re playing on Friday if it’s a back-to-back or not.

The Ducks and the Blue Jackets are immediately taken off my list because they’re likely playing Robin Lehner and Andrei Vasilevskiy, who clearly aren’t on the waiver wire, so they’re out. I also see that the Sharks only play the Wild and the Red Wings only play the Stars, both teams whose backup goalie is rostered in more than 35 percent of leagues, so those teams are out as well.

That leaves us the Canadiens playing Calgary in a back-to-back, the Predators playing Chicago on Friday, the Devils playing Pittsburgh on Saturday and the Flyers on Sunday, and the Flyers play the Rangers on the back-half of a back-to-back game on Friday and the Sabres on Sunday.

Let’s start with the Calgary Flames who get to play the cold Canadiens. First, we have to acknowledge while the Habs are cold overall, they did at least beat the Oilers the other day four to three, so they’re not ICE cold. However, by taking a quick stroll to the "Team Stats" page on Frozen Tools we can quickly see that if we were to take that last game away that the Canadiens only had 12 Goals For in their last eight games over the last two weeks.

I am admittedly not a big Dominique Ducharme fan so I will admit my bias here, but I think the stats show we have reason to believe the Canadiens are one of the better teams to play against for a backup goalie that we’re picking up off of the waiver wire. Now, the only thing about that is that the team they’re playing against is the Flames. It’s very possible Jacob Markstrom just plays both games. In fact, I don’t even know who the Flames backup goalie is? Lucky for us Frozen Tools also has a Depth Chart tool.

Well, Artyom Zagidulin has only played one game so far this year, I’m pretty sure they’d ride with good old Louis Domingue. Remember him? He hasn’t played at all this year. As much as I love Louis Domingue, this is the fantasy hockey playoffs. It’s kind of hard to put an entire season on the line just because of that one time in 2018 when Louis had that nice run with the Lightning. In fact, we can even the game log in his player page to relive that glorious month.

Oh yeah, those were the days. But let’s get back to the task at hand. The Nashville Predators play the Chicago Blackhawks on Friday, but I think the odds are just too great here that Kevin Lankinen gets the start for that game. Even though he hadn’t played that well as of late, Malcolm Subban did give up four goals in his last start so I don’t think that was enough to get him two starts in a row. That, and the fact that my favorite Predator Eeli Tolvanen is back from injury and we’ve already seen the immediate impact that had on the Predators as they scored four goals in their last game. I think he wakes them up from their cold stretch, so we’ll keep searching.

Our next cold team is the New Jersey Devils. They play the Penguins on Saturday and the Flyers on Sunday. I’m not putting my fantasy hockey season on the line for a Philadelphia goaltender. No thank you. However, the Penguins are a different story. Looking at the Schedule Planner for the Penguins we see that they play a back-to-back Saturday and Sunday against the Devils and the Bruins, respectively. Casey DeSmith might not be available in your league, as he is rostered in 32 percent of Yahoo leagues right now, but he could be worth a shot here. Let’s use the "Goalie Vs Opponent" feature in Frozen Tools to make sure that Devils don’t somehow dominate DeSmith or anything like that.

Two Devil games and two wins for DeSmith, although the four GA in his last outing against them makes me not quite as enthusiastic as I was before. Add that into the fact that we don’t exactly know if DeSmith will get the Devils or the Bruins this weekend and I’m determined to keep looking for my perfect waiver goalie. The last cold team was the Philadelphia Flyers. And even though they may have beat the Rangers three to two on Thursday, I don’t buy that for a second that that will continue. For one thing, at least I know which goaltender the Rangers are probably going to start on Friday: that’s gorgeous Alexandar Georgiev. Secondly, the Flyers are terrible, there’s no way that they can actually win two games in a row. Thirdly, have you honestly ever seen the Flyers win the Stanley Cup?