DFS Thursday: Lightning Looking To Take Home-Ice Advantage Away
Stephen Dotzel
2022-06-09
With Colorado's sweep we are officially down to just one series happening until someone hoists the Stanley Cup. That means are DFS options are down to single-game Showdown on DrafKings. As a quick refresher, Showdown consists of a roster of six players. One of your six players is designated as your captain and that player will score points on a 1.5x multiplier, but will also cost 1.5x their standard price. Let's discuss some lineup construction ideas for this format.
I think the best way to attack showdown is to reverse engineer your lineup. So think of what you expect the final score to be, and then try to build your lineup in a way that lends to itself to that outcome. For example, if you think the Lightning are going to win tonight's game say 3-1, it would make sense to have Andrei Vasilevskiy in your lineup, and probably as your captain. If you think the game will be high scoring and the Lightning will instead win like 5-4, well then you might not want to include any goalies as they will have a difficult time outscoring the skaters who are in on all those goals.
Even if you don't have a feel for the game, it can still be helpful to think through some outcomes and build a few lineups that make sense given that outcome. I hope that advice makes sense and can be more valuable to you than just listing some players. Now with that said, I still have to make some recommendations so let's build a lineup I like for tonight's slate using that thought process.
With the series now tied at 2-2 and both teams holding serve on home ice, the edge should be with the Rangers tonight. However, they are a little banged up with both Ryan Strome and Filip Chytil both questionable and that could leave the Rangers thin down the middle. That. coupled with the fact this is a pivotal, gut check-type game, and I'm actually leaning toward the Lightning here as they have seemingly won every one of these type games over the past three seasons.
With that thinking I'm starting with Vasilevskiy as my captain, but I'm also adding Igor Shesterkin as a flex since I'm not expecting many goals. Paying up for both goalies means we're going to have to go value hunting. The player that stands to benefit the most from any missed time by the Rangers centers would be Barclay Goodrow. At just $3,800 he provides some of the salary relief we need. To round out the lineup I'm looking at some Lightning players I think will find the scoresheet. Nikita Kucherov is obviously at the top of the list and I'll pair him with Ondrej Palat, who's coming off a three-point game, and Brandon Hagel, who is minimum priced but should give us a decent floor with eight shots taken over the past two games.
Best of luck with your lineups! 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!