Written by LineStar Fantasy Life Coach @ZeroInDenver.

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Welcome to the NHL Hat Trick.

I hope NHL DFS has been treating you well.

A little bit of a repeat from last night in that we get another 7 games tonight. Calgary and Tampa played last night, but I wouldn't count them out tonight for that fact alone.

Lots of interesting directions to take as well. At least for me, there's no obvious chalk that stands out. I'm getting a lot of COL1 in optimizer builds, but I haven't decided what stance I want to take on them.

Running late for today so let's dive in.

Tonight's Slate

I'm bringing back the slate chart. Remember, this looks at times over their last 10 regular-season games, going back to the 2020-2021 season.

I mentioned this in chat, but I often use this to look for mismatches (teams that give up a lot of shots facing teams that take a lot of shots) and spots where both teams have sub 50% CF%. Those teams include WPG and ANH. So if you're looking for "sneaky" stacks, that's where I start.

Tonight's Targets

Goaltender

**Not all goaltenders have been confirmed as starters at the time of this writing**

My preference is to correlate goalie with one of my stacks, but my favorite tonight is:

Nico Daws - NJ (DK: $7400, FD: $7100)

This is a bit of a gamble, and there are plenty of people that say back-to-backs don't matter, but I'm going to go for it here with Daws.

Center

My favorite:

Evan Rodrigues - PIT (DK: $3900, FD: $4700)

Tampa gives up the most fantasy points to an opposing line tonight with 56.9 DK points (66.3 FD points) to the opposing top line on average over the last 5 games. Rodrigues is super cheap and will allow you to spend up for MacKinnon or another top-tier center tonight.

Wing

My favorite:

Kyle Connor - WPG (DK: $7500, FD: $8100)

Dude has been on fire and is a great late night hammer for tonight.

Defensemen

My favorite:

Josh Morrissey - WPG (DK: $4400, FD: $4100)

Again, trying to keep on the lower end of pricing for defensemen so I can spend up on forwards. A little bit of correlation if you pair with Connor and I love playing defenseman that take shots on the power play.

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:

Jason Zucker - PIT (DK: $3100, FD: $4300)

Cheap and top power play unit for Pittsburgh.

Line Stacks

Before going further, let's make this clear:

You 👏 dont 👏 have 👏 to 👏 stack.

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 NJD1.

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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