Welcome to the Tuesday edition of the daily fantasy hockey morning coffee. Today we have a nine game slate to dig through for our daily fantasy purposes. Of those nine games there are three teams I want to target when constructing my rosters tonight:
Detroit Red Wings @ Toronto Maple Leafs (Toronto, -175, 5.5 over/under)
Carolina Hurricanes @ Colorado Avalanche (Carolina, -155, 5.5 over/under)
New Jersey Devils @ Columbus Blue Jackets (Columbus, -250, 5 over/under)
It’s a strange slate, at least from my perspective, as the teams I want to use in my tournaments have largely been offensively snake-bitten over the past week or so. But I think their competition allows for a chance for some slumps to be broken tonight. I have included some further plays in the Notes section at the end of the article that might be more comfortable picks if you simply don’t trust these teams.
The first game I have interest in tonight is the Detroit Red Wings at the Toronto Maple Leafs — and I really have interest in both sides of this one for tournaments. Last month Toronto averaged 3.00 goals per game and over their past 10 games have a SCF/60 rate of 33.77 — second only to the Pittsburgh Penguins. The reason I list them as more of a tournament play for me is that, while they have generated scoring chances, over their last five games they have not produced many goals:
Feb. 23 — 1
Feb. 25 — 2
Feb. 28 — 1
March 2. — 2
March 3. — 2
While they have have only scored eight goals over those five games (also a five-game losing streak) this is still the same team with an xGF/60 of 3.20 — highest in the NHL. This is also the same team that scored 21 goals in their five games prior to their current five-game losing streak. Our hope here is that Toronto finds their scoring touch against a Detroit team that allowed 2.91 goals per game in February and have allowed seven goals over their last two games — and that their recent offensive woes gives us some nice ownership percentages on players like Matthews.
Toronto’s