Big weekend for user Aaron in chat using his own spin on the Option A/Option B 3/3 FWD stacks we have been talking about.
Nearly takes down the mini-max on Saturday Nov 4th with a 2nd place finish (with a couple other top 20 finishes). Great to see some distribution like this from his 150 lineups.
Then he follows this up with a mini-max win yesterday with a TOR1/VAN3(or 4?) stack and massive performances from Quinn Hughes and Victor Hedman. Also, had 3rd and 4th place there. Things we absolute LOVE to see.
Nice work!
Since there may be a few new NBA folks playing NHL tonight with some bigger contests on DK, will do a bit of review on lineup construction.
My advice is to keep it simple. Don’t overthink it, NHL is not that hard.
Stacking
- 3 man stack (center / wing / wing)
- 3 man stack (center / wing / wing)
- D
- D
- G
Now you absolutely can pair a D from the same team with your 3 man stack but is it “BETTER”? A few hundred slates I’ve looked at says surprisingly not. Sometimes you win with a correlated D man or a correlated G and sometimes one-off D men are the way to go. You may be afraid of going with two uncorrelated D and an uncorrelated G but those hit with regular frequency as well. So, which do you use? And when?
I’d be on an island somewhere if I could tell you that.
The real important part is to be judicious with the FWD stacks and Defencemen you make available to your optimizer. You CANNOT use everyone.
Slate Specific Thoughts:
Apologies from the get go here having to talk about the Flyers. And the Sharks. Blech.
Sharks have given up 10 goals in each of their last two games. That’s 20 goals allowed in two games for those who hate math. WOOF. Hard to ignore that kind of ineptitude.
Still, there are 18 other teams you can focus your energy on other than the Flyers.
If it were my money I would just remove all the Flyers from my pool of players and go to bed early. It’s just not worth rostering them when their ownership is gonna be through the roof and their lines could be extremely messed up based on Couturier coming back.
You can do it. Be brave!
As I said above, you cannot use everyone! We’ve been using a couple of different options lately for our 3/3 stacks. For optimizing 150 lineups you would want to pick only the forward lines from one of these two options or a combination of the two. You really don’t need more than 20 or so forward lines to make plenty of lineups for you to win with.
Option A: Top 7 lines by team line by median projection. So the top 7 FL1,FL2, FL3
Option B: Top 20 lines by median projection.
Now I’ve included 25 lines here just based on removing PHI1/PHI2 and a maybe removing a very highly owned NYI1. Optimizer is gonna give you a TON of those three lines if you let it.
Stretching the list of lines here, I do like those CAR1/TB2 lines that are cheap-ish but a little lower down on the median projections.
Remember, you don’t have to use exactly these lines but limit the number of lines you have available to your optimizer to roughly twenty.
Defencemen
Defencemen are FREEEEEEEEE!
Well, at least cheap. Should spread the ownership out some, based on having 7 PP1 D $4200 or less.
I’ve included Dougie Hamilton here even though he is listed on PP2. He’s just that good. Should be able to make anything work with this group of defencemen – again remove all other defencemen from your optimizer and just run with these.
Goalie
If you want a goalie recommendation – you have knocked on the wrong door. Goalies are a menace and anyone telling you otherwise is a lunatic.
There’s no real cheap highly projected goalie to stay away from. If you really want a recommendation just correlate your goalie with one of your forward stacks, otherwise use whoever the optimizer puts in. God speed.
And a random piece of advice from earlier in the year – DK PRICING IS NOT INDICATIVE OF BETTER GOALIE PERFORMANCE – hundreds of slates of data and it just isn’t. They don’t know how to price goalies.
If you think:
“I have the salary”
“I will UPGRADE my goalie”
Just stop.
Feel free to play a goalie for any number of reasons – He’s got a new mask! He went back to his old mask! It’s his birthday! His wife just had a baby! His father is on the trip! His mother is on the trip!
You get the idea. Just because you have the salary? HELL NO.
Good luck out there and hit up discord with any questions!