Daily Fantasy Hockey DFS Value Update – February 3

Chicago Blackhawks at Los Angeles Kings

Very quietly, the ‘Hawks have been on a slide so far in 2014: Chicago has five wins in 15 games so far this year and the problems are everywhere: Chicago has averaged 2.73 goals/game since January 1^st, about three-quarters of a goal lower per game up to that point; the team has allowed 27+ shots in 11 of their last 15 games (season average is 27.4); the power play is just 17-percent in 2014. When all these things amalgamate at the same time, you get a team that is playing below-.500 hockey for an extended period of time.

Speaking of teams with problems, goodness gracious the LA Kings can’t score to save their lives. Since the Christmas break, the Kings have gone 5-12-2 in 19 games and averaged 1.47 goals for per game. That’s an incredibly brutal number that I think only the Buffalo Sabres could rival in offensive ineptitude for such an extended period of time.

At the outset of the season, this would have been a potential Western Conference Finals preview – it still could be – but right now these are two teams trending downward. That kind of play is tough for DFS because one of these teams has to win this game and there’s no real certainty it will be low-scoring.

These two teams did meet about a month ago and it resulted in a 1-0 game so the trends and prior history would seem to say that this should be a low scoring game. That said, and this is just a complete gut feeling for which I have zero empirical evidence to prove, I think this game probably ends up 3-2 or something like that. It’s worrisome enough, though, that I’ll probably just stay away from this game altogether.

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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