Before getting into our Saturday slate, we have to give recognition to Tage Thompson who put up one of the greatest daily fantasy performances of all-time on Wednesday. With five goals, nine shots, and an assist Thompson put up 70.0 DraftKings points by himself. That's the most fantasy points by a player that I was able to find, surpassing the totals of Timo Meier, Mika Zibanejad, and Patrik Laine who have all also had five-goal games over the past few seasons. With Thompson's monster performance it turned any tournaments on their head as winning scores blew way over 200 DraftKings points and you had no chance of winning without Thompson. Nights like that are great when you have that player in your lineup, but on nights you don't, well, you can get to bed early at least.

The schedule this week has been a funky one for NHL standards. The usual Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday heavy lifting days were more evened out across the whole week. Personally, I'm a big fan of that as I find it more fun for daily fantasy having five or more games every day as compared to 12 followed by just two or three. A casualty of the changes for this week is our Saturday slate tonight, as there's only five games, likely a result of a beefed-up Friday that featured ten. With that said, we'll make the best of it and with this small slate it could be a good time to play around with our tools at DFS Central. As for the spots I'm targeting, keep on reading. The player prices are from DraftKings, but the information and concepts can be applied to any site.

Top-Tier Stack to Pay Up For

I suspect with Wednesday's eruption fresh in everyone's mind, a good portion of players will be looking at Buffalo tonight. I will take the contrarian angle and fire up the Penguins on home ice tonight. The biggest knock on the Sabres all season has been goaltending and the Penguins will be seeing Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen, whose shortcomings have been covered up of late by the Sabres offense. Luukkonen is 2-1-1 in his last four starts but has allowed 18 goals in those games and has a putrid .838 save percentage. With the Penguins involved, I'm of course looking at Sidney Crosby ($7,200) and Jake Guentzel ($7,600) to start. With Kris Letang still out, Jeff Petry ($5,500) makes for an easy add to the stack. From there, I'd look at Rickard Rakell ($5,600) who's been seeing top power-play minutes of late over Bryan Rust and joins Crosby and Guentzel on the top line.

Mid-Tier Stack to Target

The Minnesota Wild had the unfortunate circumstances of having to chase Connor McDavid and company around the ice on Friday, and then turn right around and play again on the road Saturday. That's a tough ask of any team, so I will look at the Canucks who happen to be riding a two-week winning streak here in this column. If you can afford the Bo Horvat ($7,500) line I like going there but since this is the mid-tier section and we're on a bit of a budget, I'll look at the second line of Elias Pettersson ($6,800), Brock Boeser ($4,300) and Ilya Mikheyev ($3,500). This trio has combined for six goals and 12 assists over the last three games and kicked in 23 shots as well. All three bode well for fantasy scoring if they can continue this run of a good play.

Cheap Stack to Build Around

I'd like to roster a few Kings on this slate given their matchup against the Canadiens, so why not start with the former Canadien – Phillip Danault ($4,600) who returns to Montreal tonight to face his old team. Danault doesn't offer a ton of offense on most nights but perhaps this one he'll have a little extra juice. The real hope here is Danault can set up his linemates of Viktor Arvidsson ($4,800) and Trevor Moore ($4,600) for a few goals as that duo has scored four times and added 34 shots over the past five games. At their price tags, two goals combined between the three could be all we need if the top-end guys we're able to fit with them do their part.   

Goalies

When it comes to goalies, I like to correlate mine with one of my stacks. However, if you're looking to just pluck a one-off, I'd consider Ilya Sorokin ($7,200). Sorokin has been one of the top goalies in the league all season with a .927 save percentage and draws a home matchup tonight against a Hurricanes team likely missing their top center in Sebastian Aho. Somehow of the ten projected goalies on this slate, Sorokin comes in as the second cheapest. Don't overthink this one.

Be sure to follow me on Twitter @SteveDotzel so you can follow my "DFS-NHL" list which is comprised of dozens of team accounts and beat writers providing important updates throughout the day. Best of luck with your lineups!