Daily fantasy sports are booming, and fantasy hockey is no exception.
But there are problems with daily fantasy. When it comes to hockey, a goalie that gets scratched at the last-minute, a player that leaves warm ups early and line combination adjustments made in-game can all wreak havoc on your lineups, and none of it is your fault.
So you have to let go of what you can’t control and work on what you can control. One thing you can control is how you spend your money in your daily lineups.
Values vary from site to site, and these are for DraftDay Fantasy Hockey games. For a couple of weeks now I’ve been posting daily updates, combinations, and most importantly, value pick recommendations for each and every single game at each position. Those value picks aren’t necessarily high-priced picks or superstars either: Over the last 16 days, I’ve picked Alex Ovechkin once, Sidney Crosby zero times, Logan Couture zero times, Alex Steen zero, P.K. Subban zero, etc. Telling you to start a superstar (unless there really aren’t better options that day) is pretty redundant. You can figure out on your own that Alex Ovechkin is good at scoring goals. I’m here to help you figure out who’s going to be scoring for Washington when he is not.
I’ll walk you through how I do my daily fantasy hockey lineups:
- Every day there’s a couple of hours of research that goes into trends, streaks, matchups and so on.
- I usually look for, and start with, a cheap goalie. The thing with goaltending is that over the course of a full season, talent usually wins out. In a one-game situation, though, literally anything can happen and anyone can have a great game or bust game. The trick is to find out who is going to maximize value over the long term (backups on good teams is a good place to start) and no to get frustrated if you take a cheap goalie and he gets blown up. If I really like a matchup, I will absolutely spend money on a Henrik Lundqvist or Tuukka Rask. Most of the time, however, you’ll find backups on good teams and situational starts in my lineups.
- The wide majority of your points will come from your skaters, so that is the focus here. I always give goalie recommendations, but put a bit less thought into it than the skaters because they simply aren’t as important.
Some people are really good at DFS, some people are really bad, and some people are just caught in between. I took that concept and applied it to my daily hockey picks.
My price point for Draft Day valuation is absolutely no more than $3,000 per fantasy point, preferably around $2,900 per point. That gives us a base of around 29 points to work off of our skaters, and around $15,000 to spend on a goalie. In a 50/50 type of game, that 36-point mark should be your goal (on DraftDay) each and every single day.
Obviously you’re not going to get there every day, but you should be able to more often than not, and hopefully no less than three times out of five. That should give you profits in the long-term.
The last problem is, where do you get advice? Once we get into daily hockey, situations can change dramatically every day and you have to stay on top of it. That type of advice is provided in my daily updates.
But what good is some random internet guy giving you picks unless there’s a track record to prove it?
Well, here it is. Below is the graph of the cost per fantasy point of each pick I have made since I started my DFS pieces for XN Sports.
VALUE PRICING
This is the breakdown of the graph:
- The first few days I worked DFS for XN Sports, I didn’t sort by confidence in games, I just previewed every game and gave picks. That’s represented by the purple line. You’ll notice that on average, over the five types of picks, we’re hitting our mark except in the Bargain Bin.
- The blue line is our value picks. Those are the picks from games I don’t have much confidence in, should be low scoring or otherwise don’t have a good read. You’ll see how wild those picks can vary (low-$2,787, high-$3,933) and that high of a variance is killer in DFS. There’s a reason I don’t recommend those games.
- The red line is the in-between picks. Those are guys from games between closely matched teams, bad matchups for otherwise good teams or any other reason. The games contained here are ones that I have a better read on, should be higher-scoring and are good to pick line mates from perhaps. They still aren’t the best games to pick from, but the variance goes down (low-$2,840, high-$3,567)
- The green line is the Stack picks. Those are players from games where I expect one side to blow out the other, both teams are high-scoring and the game profiles as such, or there are other reasons why it would be a good idea to pick a lot of players from this game. You’ll notice that in these games, not only am I below the $2,900 mark across every category, but the variance has declined (low-$2,229, high-$2,629) by over 55 percent even from the in-between picks. In short, as expected, the games I have the most confidence in, the picks are producing more value, more consistently, with less variance.
If anyone out there wants my spreadsheets, I’m more than happy to screencap them for you (I won’t actually send them). That graph is a function of every dollar and every quarter fantasy point being researched for hours upon hours on end.
It also gives you an idea of where to spend your money. There are reasons why all the picks in the daily values are color-coded. A handicapper doesn’t pick a winner in every game because he/she can, that’s a losing strategy that will bankrupt your bankroll pretty quickly. I have every game covered because once in a while, you need a particular position filled and there are budget considerations. If you pick mostly from the Stack games, in the long run, you should win more than you lose.
I’ll have an update sometime in January to check in and see where we are.
May the Corsi be with you.
