Daily Fantasy Hockey DFS Value Update – January 14th

Edmonton Oilers at Dallas Stars

Yesterday on Twitter I was wondering aloud about why Dallas rookie Valeri Nichushkin’s ice time and position on the depth chart had been sinking like a bag of rocks and then this tweet came out today:

Lindy Ruff said Val Nichushkin has been a little banged up and fatigued. Almost missed a game, trying to limit his minutes.

— Mark Stepneski (@StarsInsideEdge) January 14, 2014

Now it makes sense.

This hurts Dallas, though, as if he’s not nearly 100-percent and Tyler Seguin continues his slump (five consecutive games without a point), there’s not a lot of scoring depth behind Jamie Benn to fill the net. This seems like an ideal matchup on paper for Dallas to get their scoring going – the team has scored 12 goals in their last six games, all regulation losses – but I’m not so sure they’ll get the win.

Edmonton has just two wins in their last 10 road games but oddly enough, one of those wins was a 3-2 shootout win on December 1^st in Dallas. Sure, it was a game that they gave up 45 shots, but they managed 32 of their own (a number they haven’t gotten to since) and even drew six penalties (though they failed to score on any of them).

It’s a little off the board but stars are aligning (pun fully intended) for Edmonton to sneak a win tonight. If you want an off-the-board GPP goalie, a cheap Ilya Bryzgalov might be the way to go. One note on that December 1^st game: Edmonton’s goals came from defense and depth players as the Ryan Nugent-Hopkins line was matched against the Benn line for most of the night.

Good luck!

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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