Written by LineStar Fantasy Life Coach @ZeroInDenver.

Check out the NHL Season Preview & Strategy Guide

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Welcome to the NHL Hat Trick. NHL is finally back.

I'm excited to see some familiar faces in chat already, and I'm looking forward to seeing new faces, as well as some of the regulars from other sports, give NHL a try.

I'm going to get this out of the way. NHL is one of my favorite sports, but it can be a really frustrating sport for DFS. For starters, one of the first things you'll notice is that the contest selection and payouts aren't nearly at the level of NFL, NBA, or MLB. Comparatively speaking, I like to think that I'm playing NHL for lunch money. Also, it can be a slow sport in terms of fantasy points being accumulated. Don't be surprised if a good amount of time can elapse and your score and place in the leaderboard hasn't changed. However, NHL DFS is great in that goals can increase your position dramatically. There have been numerous occasions where a couple of late goals have moved me from just outside of the pay line to solid cash.

Even with all the Debbie Downer talk, I'm excited about this season. Overall, my goal is to help you all get better at building lineups using the tools LineStar offers. If stuff doesn't make sense in the newsletter (or I have typos) let me know. With that said...

LETTTTTTTTTTTTTTTSSSSSSSSSGOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

Morning Skate

One question I see the most from people new to NHL DFS is "when do lineups come out? " To put it simply, they don't. Instead, most teams conduct a "morning skate" where teams take the ice for 30 minutes or so in the morning to run drills and get loose for that evening's game. Beat writers often attend morning skates and take note of line rushes and may get a chance to interview coaches. From that, we get a pretty good idea of what goalie is starting that night and what lines players will be on.

In other words, you can set your DFS lineups early. I typically build and set my lineups around lunchtime.

However, I would absolutely encourage you to pay attention to the chat or Twitter in the 30-minute period before each game starts to make sure there are no late scratches or changes.

Tonight's Targets

If you remember last year, I had a lot of fancy graphs that I used to rank players at each position where you could get a visual indication of how they match up. Remember, this is the start of the 2021-2022 season. The data I have is from LAST YEAR'S regular season. Still, I think it's useful.

Goaltender

Two games on the slate. Let's not overthink this:

"Smart" Play:

Andrei Vasilevskiy - TB - (DK: $8000, FD: $8700)

Who I'll have an uncomfortable amount of:

Philipp Grubauer - SEA - (DK: $7000, FD: $7300)

Center

Until we get some real data for this season, you're going to see some weird things in the charts below. Rodrigues doesn't have shot info because he didn't play the final 5 regular season games for the Penguins.

My favorite:

Alex Wennberg - SEA (DK: $5100, FD: $3400)

Wing

For me, this is the position to spend up at tonight.

My favorite:

Nikita Kucherov - TBL (DK: $8000, FD: $8600)

Defensemen

If we're spending up at W, we're probably going to need to spend down at D.

My favorite:

Alec Martinez - VGK (DK: $5500, FD: $4600)

If you take anything away from this, keep in mind that hockey is a high-variance sport. The top-ranked player in each category could be a great play or be a dud tonight. Going all-in on any player probably isn't a great move.

With DFS, I try to think of these things:

• Who makes the most sense to play?

• Where is the field leaning?

• Who has been the most consistent?

• Who has the most upside?

• Who will benefit me most if others are wrong?

Spending Down

Some people call these "value" plays or "salary savers", but these are players that I like for tonight that fit at the lowest salary tier. It could be they're playing on one of the top forward lines or it could be that they've been playing well, but these are my cheap calls for a skater to pick up a goal or assist.

My favorite:

Danton Heinen - PIT (DK: $3300, FD: $3600)

Line Stacks

Line stacking is a common strategy in GPP. You’ll see a lot of winning lineups where players are stacked from the same forward lines or power play lines. DraftKings allows a maximum of 6 skaters from the same team (with skaters from at least 3 teams) and FanDuel allows a maximum of 4 skaters from one team. In tournaments, you'll often see 3-3 stacks (meaning 3 players from one team and 3 from another team), 4-3, and 3-3-2 stacks.

Here are my favorite stacks (ranked in order of preference) for tonight:

And the RISK IT FOR THE BISCUIT stack... let's go with SEA1. This is a pretty contrarian stack in that Lehner should go fairly well-owned tonight as I expect Vegas to be well-owned.

Keep in mind, these are my favorites. You should all do your own research and you might (and probably should) disagree with me in some spots. Don't be afraid to go your own way.

Good luck today! Tag me in the LineStar Chat @ZeroInDenver if you have any questions or feedback. Follow me on Twitter @ZeroInDenver.

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