DFS Saturday: Playing Lower-Seeded Teams
Stephen Dotzel
2022-05-07
It's Groundhog Day here with today's DFS slate being identical to the one from Thursday's with the same four matchups, however we do get a venue shift with all four series moving to the lower seed's arena. While I understand rostering players from Nashville, Pittsburgh, and Dallas may seem counterintuitive considering the majority of people feel they are the inferior team, a shift to their home arenas could give one or two of these teams a scoring bump and very few have been rostering them.
To get a visual of what I mean, here are the average ownership numbers for each player on each team through the first two games of each series. Numbers come from the DraftKings mini-max contest with about 9,000 entries. I removed any player averaging 1% or less.
You can notice that outside of the Florida-Washington series which is somewhat close, the lower-seeded team is coming in at much less ownership than the higher-seeded team. While this shouldn't come as a surprise, it does set up well for a team like Dallas or Pittsburgh in tournaments if they can score a few goals on home ice at 10% ownership or less.
Playing low-owned players/teams isn't necessarily the key to winning, but it helps to think of large tournaments as follows. There are 9,000 entries in this tournament. If you play Colorado and things go right for you, meaning you get multiple goals from your players/stack, so did roughly 30% of the field, or about 2,700 lineups. You are now competing with those 2,700 other lineups for first place, which will obviously be decided by the rest of your roster.
If you played Dallas, and things go right, well only 7% of the field, or about 630 lineups have them. Your chances of coming in first place are betting trying to beat out 630 lineups as compared to 2,700 lineups. Obviously on paper and in the long run, Colorado will outscore Dallas more often than not. However, in a one-game sample anything can happen and that's the beauty and curse of DFS.
Hopefully some of that makes sense, so thank you for coming to my TED talk. Now let's get to some actual plays for this four-game slate. An important note that this slate starts at 1 pm EST, not the usual 7 pm EST we're used to. You will have to get lineups in early! All players and prices are from DraftKings but can be applied to any site.
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Top-Tier Stack to Target
I'm not going to say don't play Colorado, and I certainly would in small tournaments, leagues, or cash games (double ups, 50/50's), but for large tournaments I'm gambling Nashville steals a game tonight because if it doesn't happen here, well it probably won't. So excluding Colorado, I'm going back to the Florida well. Their ownership is not out of control by any means and I really like Jonathan Huberdeau ($7,100) and Sam Reinhart ($4,500) together. You can stack them with either Sam Bennett ($4,600) who skates with them at even strength or Aleksander Barkov ($7,400) who joins them on the power play.
Also consider Pittsburgh. Their trouble in net shouldn't impact the offense much and the top line has been killing the Rangers in the first two games scoring all five of the teams' goals. Now in Pittsburgh only Igor Shesterkin stands in the way of Sidney Crosby ($7,200), Jake Guentzel ($7,000), and Bryan Rust ($5,100) adding on to that goal total. Their ownership has been crazy low as seen above, probably because Shesterkin has been the highest-owned goalie each day and people aren't going to play skaters against their goalie. Regardless, I think the chances will be there as they've been all series it just depends whether Shesterkin is on his game or not.
Mid-Tier Stack to Target
In Thursday's article which you can read here I talked about how Louis Domingue was likely in trouble and that proved true with him allowing five goals. The fact of the matter is until the Penguins get either Tristan Jarry or Casey DeSmith back, it will be hard to look beyond the Rangers for DFS. Once again focus on the skaters on that top power play unit specifically Chris Kreider ($6,200), Mika Zibanejad ($6,300), Artemi Panarin ($5,300), and Adam Fox ($6,300).
Value Stack to Target
Nicklas Backstrom ($3,000), and T.J. Oshie ($3,200) skated together on Thursday and correlate well together due to the fact they also see top power-play time. You're not going to find a cheaper top six or top power-play duo on the slate.
Cheap Power Play 1 Plugs
C – Backstrom ($3,000), Ryan Johansen ($3,600), Ryan Strome ($3,900)
W – Alexander Radulov ($2,500), Oshie ($3,200), Tyler Toffoli ($3,400)
D – John Klingberg ($4,200), Noah Hanifin ($4,800), John Carlson ($5,500)
Goalie Picks
When in doubt, include your goalie with one of the team stacks within your lineup in the hopes of picking up the win if your stack performs well. Otherwise, consider:
Igor Shesterkin ($8,500) – I see this game going one of two ways. The Penguins fire off about 40 shots on goal and either Shesterkin is his stellar self, stopping most and racking up a bunch of fantasy points including the 35 save bonus OR he's a bit off and Pittsburgh burns him for 3-5 goals. For that I'll probably roster Shesterkin in a majority of my lineups with Penguins stacks in those that I don't.
Jacob Markstrom ($8,100) – The shot volume hasn't really been there for the Stars to give Markstrom the saves he needs to rack up a big score. However, with the Stars now at home perhaps those numbers get a boost. Markstrom has been stellar through two games having only allowed one goal total.
Be sure to double check your lineups before lock for any last-minute scratches or goalie changes. If you follow me on Twitter @SteveDotzel you can subscribe to my "DFS-NHL" list which is comprised of several team beat writers tweeting the most recent news in real-time. You can also reach out to me personally and I'll do my best to answer any questions I can. Hope to see you on top of the leaderboards!