DFS Fantasy Hockey Daily Value Update – December 17

Vancouver Canucks at Minnesota Wild

At first blush, I wasn’t feeling overly keen on taking high-priced Canucks players in Minnesota, as the Wild are a pretty good home team and goalie Josh Harding is playing lights-out hockey.

Then, this:

Josh Harding leaving #mnwild morning skate in pain after taking a high shot from Erik Haula. Nik Backstrom better get ready #canucks

— Michael Russo (@RussoHockey) December 17, 2013

Ruh roh.

Then, a few minutes later:

Good news, Harding back on ice #mnwild

— Kevin Falness (@RadioFalness) December 17, 2013

Ok then?

This is one of those situations where if I knew for certain that Harding or Backstrom would play, and are healthy, I could plan accordingly. However, even if Harding does start tonight, it’s not certain what his true health status is.

The Canucks have won seven straight games, allowing only seven goals over that stretch of games. It was likely that Vancouver would take a while to get used to their new coach’s tactics, and it’s starting to pay off. On top of that, their power play (which was a problem early on at times) has now scored at least one goal in nine of their last 11 games.

Minnesota is having a whole host of problems lately. They’ve gone 4-6-1 in their last 11 games and have scored just 11 goals in their last five home games, allowing 10 over that stretch. Their power play has been the opposite of the Canucks, scoring just three times with the man advantage over their last 25 opportunities, a 12-percent clip.

This could be low-scoring, it could be high-scoring. I will tell you for sure that the Koivu line and Sedin line will be matched up together. For now, I’ll assume it’s an in-between game and you should keep refreshing Left Wing Lock for your current goalie updates.

Michael Clifford

Michael Clifford was born and raised in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada and is a graduate of the Unviersity of New Brunswick. He writes about fantasy hockey and baseball for XNSports and FantasyTrade411.com. He can be reached on Twitter @SlimCliffy for any fantasy hockey questions. Follow @SlimCliffy !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');

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