Daily Fantasy, Daily Life: Volume IX - Say Hello to NHL DFS
So I’ll always toss in a golf lineup or two, despite the fact I have never, not once, not even for a moment, sweated a PGA lineup on a Sunday. I’ve never sniffed the top of a leaderboard. It makes me sad.
I’ll also throw in a pair of MMA lineups each week, which I started doing during the pandemic and when MMA was one of the only games in town.
And when I say “toss” and “throw,” I kind of mean it. There’s not a lot of research on my end. I check out what our experts here have to say, I check the odds, I glance at Twitter, I mash some buttons, and there you go. It’s a five-minute process, and it’s not a process.
With the NFL, NBA, and MLB, however? It’s a capital-p Process. It’s almost – and I don’t say this lightly – religious in its nature. There are daily rituals, an order to it all, and not without a few prayers thrown in. Really: I organize my day around DFS.
For the NBA, it goes something like this: I wake up and scroll through DraftKings and make a lineup. It’s going to change, but I want to get a flavor for the slate before I do anything. From there, I’ll listen to the Morning Grind on 2x speed with StevieTPFL and Co. I’ll read Andy Means’ Core Plays. I’ll check out LineupHQ for the first of 300 times. I’ll make another lineup or two. I’ll reserve a few more. I’ll check Twitter like it’s my job. Whenever I have a break in the day – or more to the point, whenever I need a break in the day – I’ll tinker around. It all culminates in Crunch Time (if possible, as fatherhood tends to interfere a bit) and me telling my wife at 6:50 p.m., “I just need 10 minutes and I’m done.”
Except I’m not done, as then I need to make sure there’s no late scratch shenanigans and such. (I never watch the games. Literally. Column for another day.)
So yes. As you can see, there are rituals. MLB is more or less the same, and the NFL is just an all-week extravaganza of lineup-building, podcast listening, article reading.
Without DFS, my days are … well, they are not as structured. Hence, my KBO era during the worst of the pandemic. It is not an exaggeration to say Korean baseball kept me sane.
lang=“en” dir=“ltr”>How Korean baseball helped keep me sane during the worst of the coronavirus. (Really.)
freddiemills7</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/davepotts2?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">davepotts2chiefjustice06</a> <a href="https://t.co/F3yJmnUkzU">https://t.co/F3yJmnUkzU</a></p>— Jeff Edelstein (jeffedelstein) March 5, 2021
So.
I just gave you the above 400 words to tell you this: You better (bleeping) believe I’m going to be playing NHL DFS during the NBA All-Star break because if I don’t, my life will have no meaning. (OK, that was an exaggeration, but … well, let’s just leave it there. I need the order DFS brings to my day.)
Of course, I’m not the only NBA DFS player who is walking around like Confused John Travolta during the All-Star break.
Sure, the MLB has its own All-Star break, but that’s four days in the middle of summer. That’s a vacation. I can manage that with a few well-placed trips to the beach. The NBA All-Star break is a week in the dead of winter and it makes me want to cry.
So yes: I will strap on my skates (I don’t skate) and enter the wild world of the NHL, where – and I swear I’m not making this up – the only player I can name is Sidney Crosby, and I don’t know if he spells it “Sidney” or “Sydney” or whatever.
I am not a hockey fan. Chico Resch had just retired the last time I had any interest in hockey, and the interest wholly stemmed from the fact this girl I had a crush on in high school had a crush on Brendan Shanahan and I wanted to be able to talk hockey with her. (Spoiler alert: Neither one of us managed to land our respective crushes, though I will admit: Shanny is handsome in that “got hit by a hockey puck a few times in the face” kind of way. Anyway …)
Anyway, I need ritual and custom in my life, DFS provides that – I retired from Judaism after my Bar Mitzvah – and so I will happily lose money over the next week playing a game I don’t understand.
Actually, if history is a guide, I’ll 3X my money the first night and spend the next six days thinking I’m going to end up a professional NHL DFS player.
Of course, the regulars in the NHL streets salivate for mooks like me wandering into NHL DFS during NBA All-Star week.
“I always look forward to it,” said John Britt, one of RotoGrinders’ resident NHL experts. “But weirdly enough, it’s always a disappointing couple of days. You get your expectations up because you know there’s going to be people who don’t normally play, but if you don’t do well, you’re like, ‘damn.’ Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I did great during that week.”
Having said that, however, the sites do increase the GPP pools for the week, though Britt notes they are still “dwarfed” by normal NBA tournament standards.
But since I had Britt on the line, I figured I may as well ask for some tips, being that all I understand is offsides (I think) and something-something blue line. (I don’t understand anything.)
“If you’re playing tourneys, you have to stack linemates for sure, or power play units,” Britt said. “I like to look at puck possession numbers. If you get a team or a line that is good with puck possession going up against a team or a line that is not, you’re improving your odds.”
And then Britt hit me with knowledge that I actually felt stupid for not knowing.
“Home ice is a huge thing that people overlook in hockey,” he said. “There are rules in place to help the home team.”
Such as: During stoppages, the home team gets to put their line out after the road team. And the road team has to have it’s stick down first in face-offs. Even the rinks have subtle differences. Little things to be sure, but clearly important.
One area that’s very interesting, however, is that Britt thinks the NHL is about “15 years behind baseball when it comes to advanced stats and analytics.”
Translation: There are still tons of edges to be found, if you know where to look, and tons more edges to come.
“There’s a bunch of new statistics, but no one has really figured out yet which ones are more predictive,” Britt noted.
Hmmm. Sounds to me like NHL DFS might be ripe for the picking. Might have to dig a little deeper into this. In fact, I’ll be right back. Gotta go check something out …
{A minute later …}
It’s “Sidney” with an “i.” Let the great NHL experiment begin!
Image Credit: Imagn