When I'm covering the NHL DFS slate for the day, I generally write the Playbook very late the evening before or even into the early morning hours. I also prepare some proposed cash and GPP lineups to work off once we get all the news of the day. Usually the news of the day doesn't change things up too much, I come home from work, I make minor tweaks to my previously prepared example lineups, and I post them here on the site. Well, while I was at work today, the news of the day took a torch to the NHL DFS Playbook. Below are bullet-pointed updates for tonight's slate.

  • The Stars and Leafs are still the big favorites of the slate, but the lines we were targeting from those teams don't look as expected. At least to start, it will be Joe Pavelski and Jason Dickinson on Tyler Seguin's wings and Andreas Johnsson and William Nylander on Auston Matthews' wings. This raises Pavelski's value, and we already liked him as a value play. Dickinson is a meh play without a spot on the power play. It also would not be surprising if Jamie Benn ended up playing some in that spot. Johnsson and Nylander should both be on the top PP unit with Matthews, so all of them are good plays.
  • Those changes also have an impact on the guys not on those top lines that we expected to be on those lines. That's Alexander Radulov for Dallas and Mitch Marner for Toronto. Those guys still work for GPPs due to the high implied totals those teams have, but they might see lesser ownership not playing on their team's top lines. That's especially true for Radulov on Dallas' third line. Marner and Rads are a big part of the FD GPP lineup below.
  • One more note on the big favorites, Anton Khudobin will be in net for Dallas rather than Ben Bishop. That makes Khudobin an obvious cash game option, but he has value in all contest types on FD where he is priced very well.
  • The other big change in net is Oscar Dansk starting for Vegas rather than Marc-Andre Fleury. This will be Dansk's fifth appearance of his carrer but first this season and first since 2017, so the matchup is improved for Philadelphia. The Flyers now have the third best matchup rating at a team level per my matchup stat behind Dallas and Toronto. The top line will be Claude Giroux, James van Riemsdyk and Jakub Voracek, and that trio should stay together on the top PP unit where they'll be joined by D-man Shayne Gostisbehere. All four of those guys are priced very well on DK, so they're an interesting stack option there.
  • As for Dansk himself, he has some GPP appeal on FD where he's the cheapest goalie of the slate as the Flyers put a lot of pucks on net.
  • We had Gustav Nyquist as a value option on DK, but he's been moved down to the second line and loses some appeal as a result.