Nascar
The big question on this slate is if you want to stack Colorado, and if so, how much? They are standing out so far above the rest of the teams, and usually the sims–which air on the side of leverage– are getting to a lot of Avs stacks in single entry. Personally, I think if playing them the way to go is the full-on six man stacks, since this will naturally achieve differentiation. SaberSim was getting to these quite a bit in the early going, and my highest ROI lineup for single entry was an Avs onslaught. The problem of course, is that a portion of the onslaught is going to be somewhat chalky, but the smaller the contest the more we can live with that.
Beyond the Avs, SaberSim’s model was preferring the Flyers and the Stars. None of that should be too surprising given that the Stars have a high team total (as high as Colorado) and the Flyers are next in line, despite being a little over a .5 goal less than Colorado and Dallas. The Stars always have strong totals and they’re a great team. The problem with stacking them is that they spread around their ice time pretty evenly and their goal scoring is not highly concentrated. So with a team like Colorado, you have a much better chance of the scoring coming from the top even strength line, or even strength two. For Dallas, all three top lines and both power plays are always viable. It makes picking who to play tough, and it makes multiple goal/point performances less likely.
It’s a similar story for the Flyers. Coach Tortorello plays his lines pretty evenly, and he is known to blend the lines up in the middle of the game. That means that the correlation that you think you’re getting when you build a lineup is not always what the actual correlation looks like five minutes into the game. This can happen with any team, but it is a much more pronounced problem with the Flyers. Nevertheless, Philly offers strong leverage on tonight’s slate, and their guys, like Michkov can make for solid one-offs, as well.
Best of luck on this small four-gamer!
