Welcome to last Daily Fantasy Hockey Morning Coffee before the All-Star break.Tonight we have a big 13-game daily fantasy hockey slate to dig through for our DFS needs. There are three teams I want to lean on when constructing my lineups:
Washington Capitals @ New Jersey Devils (Washington, -175, 5 over/under)
St. Louis Blues @ Minnesota Wild (Minnestoa, -165, 5 over/under)
Toronto Maple Leafs @ Philadelphia Flyers (Philadelphia, -135, 5.5 over/under)
The red hot Washington Capitals head to New Jersey to take on the Devils tonight. This month Washington has scored 4.46 goals per game — easily the most the NHL in January. Let’s take a quick look at the amount of goals Washington has scored since Jan. 11.
Jan. 11: 5
Jan. 13: 6
Jan. 15: 5
Jan. 16: 7
Jan. 19: 7
Jan. 23 6
Jan. 24: 0
So we have the shutout on the 24th as the outlier, but Washington has been amazingly consistent this month.
There are a few things that give me pause: New Jersey has only allowed 2.08 goals against per game in January and have an xGA/60 of 2.40 at home. But when we contrast that with Washington’s third-highest 2.89 xGF/60 at even strength adjusted for score and venue we do have a clash that may be a little closer than it would appear at first glance. One other thing to consider is New Jersey’s CF60 in 5v5 situations at home — at 41.59 at home in 5v5 situations New Jersey is easily the worst in the NHL in terms of possession in those situations. So, taking all that into account, the top two lines from Washington are in play for me tonight:
Alex Ovechkin $9K (22G, 21A, 13 PPP, 184 SOG)
Nicklas Backstrom $7.1K (13G, 34A, 18 PPP, 90 SOG)
T.J. Oshie $7.2K (18G, 14A, 7 PPP, 87 SOG)
Line 2:
Marcus Johansson $5K (15G, 17A, 8 PPP, 71 SOG)
Evgeny Kuznetsov $6.6K (7G, 28A, 7 PPP, 89 SOG)
Justin Williams $5.9K (17G, 11A, 6 PPP, 103 SOG)
Andre Burakovsky also makes a nice tournament play tonight. Burakovsky has four goals and five assists over his past six games. Justin Williams has six goals and one assist over his past eight games. Evgeny Kuznetsov has two goals and three assists — two coming on the power play — over his past four games. This gives us an interesting tournament scenario where we can stack Burakovsky/Williams/Kuznetsov as a power play two stack. New Jersey has only killed off 79.1 percent of their PK chances this month.
Tonight I also want shares of