NHL Playoff Pool Strategy

This is an exciting time of the season. 

Though the seemingly never-ending Eastern Conference wild card race rages on, the playoffs are just around the corner. 

The 2023-24 NHL regular season will end on Thursday, April 18 with the playoffs beginning Saturday, April 20. The official playoff schedule has not been released yet, but expect multiple games every night in the first week of the playoffs. 

Let's be clear: The strategy for playoff pools and season-long fantasy leagues are very, very different.

In season-long leagues, a star player that plays on a losing team is still very valuable. Not so in the playoffs, where volume is king and the team that goes the furthest provides the most games and opportunities to accumulate stats. 

So the question becomes: If you think the Oilers will be ousted in the first round, do you still pick Connor McDavid first?

Here are four key tips to win your playoff pool and some food for thought:

1. Know your pool's scoring settings

This seems obvious, but every playoff, there's one person in a league who complains that they "didn't know." That's no excuse; the rules are laid out clearly for every pool, and you'll have to adjust your picks accordingly. 

For example, if goals are worth 1 point and assists are worth 0.5 points, then value goal scorers and shooters such as Martin Necas over playmakers such as Teuvo Teravainen. 

In general, the performance of goal scorers and shooters tend to be more predictable due to the amount of data that's available regarding scoring chances and expected goals. Assists are tougher because secondary assists tends to be more random and dependent on luck. 

Some categories, such as shutouts and game-winning goals, can be tricky. Try not to worry about these too much since they tend to be random, and who knows who the unsung hero will be this season. 

Goalies can be a little tricky. Though some leagues may value saves over wins, or vice versa, the best strategy is to pick the starter for a team that you think will go far. 

Which brings up Tip No. 2...

2. Pick players and goalies from teams you think will win it all

Volume is king, and the only guarantee is that all 16 playoff teams will play at least four games. 

Identifying the team that will go the furthest will be extremely difficult this season due to the amount of parity among the top teams in the league. Finishing first in the league, however, has not been a good indicator of playoff success. This is the Presidents' Trophy curse and note the Bruins, last season's champion by a significant margin, were ousted in the first round. 

While spreading the wealth and picking only the top players from multiple teams ensures you likely won't finish last, too often the winner of the pool is the one who ends up stacking players from the team that makes the Stanley Cup finals. Spreading out your picks limits your upside because you might be stuck with just one or two players remaining in your playoff pool when the finals begin.

Picking players from multiple teams really only makes sense if your playoff pool does not allow entries/teams to select the same players as the other competitors. 

The key is to have conviction in the teams you believe in, and stick to the two or three teams you think will go far. The best way to do this is to fill out a bracket and see who your four conference finalists will be. 

The top playoff scorer every season tends to play around 20-25 games. The only recent exceptions were in 2021-22 when Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl scored 33 and 32 points, respectively, in just 16 playoff games. Conn Smythe winner Cale Makar finished third overall in scoring with 29 points in 20 games that season, while Nikita Kucherov finished fourth with 27 points in 23 games. 

The only things we know at this juncture:

- The Leafs will not have home-ice advantage in Round 1
- The Lightning will be top wild card in the East
- The eight teams in the West have been decided, only seeding is TBD
- The Stars will face one of the two wild cards in the West
- The Jets and Avalanche will meet in Round 1 with home-ice advantage TBD

The most likely scenarios as of Sunday:

Bruins vs. Lightning
Panthers vs. Maple Leafs
Rangers vs. Capitals
Hurricanes vs. Islanders

Stars vs. Golden Knights
Jets vs. Avalanche 
Canucks vs. Predators
Oilers vs. Kings

Other possible scenarios:

Bruins/Panthers vs. Maple Leafs/Lightning
Rangers/Hurricanes vs. Islanders/Capitals/Red Wings/Flyers/Penguins

Stars/Canucks/Oilers vs. Golden Knights/Kings
Canucks/Oilers vs. Predators

3. Be bold

This is more of a mantra, but note upsets will happen; it's just a part of hockey life.

Taking the favorite in every matchup ensures you'll be wrong at some point. In a high-risk, high-reward, winner-take-all kind of pool, going against the grain can pay dividends. 

The Kings, for example, play such a suffocating style at even strength that they seem tailor-made to grind out wins in a grueling playoff. If you think they have a chance to at least reach the conference finals, you can load up on their players because few others will. 

Try not to go too far by stacking only one team. There usually aren't enough quality players from one team to fill out your entire playoff pool entry, anyway, so you'll need to pick players from other teams, perhaps from the other conference. 

4. For daily games, know your stuff

Daily fantasy games will be much more active than playoff pools. The keys to remember:

- know which players are hot or not
- know which players are injured/returning to action
- know the goalie rotations

Though there have been studies done to show that carrying positive momentum from the end of the regular season to the playoffs has no bearing on their performance, it's still important to keep an eye on who's on a hot streak, especially with goalies. You never know when we might see a hot run like Ivan Barbashev and Chandler Stephenson last season or Cam Ward in 2006. 

At this time of the year, injuries can play a huge role. Knowing that Mark Stone is possible to play in Game 1 of the opening round, or that Connor McDavid may not be 100 percent, or that Gabriel Landeskog might return soon, could prove to be the edge you need to win your pool.

Knowing goalie rotations will be vital. We know, for example, that the Bruins will likely rotate Linus Ullmark and Jeremy Swayman again. The Hurricanes might do the same with Frederik Andersen and Pyotr Kochetkov, but there's also a chance they go with Andersen full-time. The difference is getting either all the starts or just half the starts for each team. 

Even if you think the Bruins and Canes will go far, be wary that picking the tandem will incur the potential opportunity cost of having one less player who may play every game.

5. An example

If I think, for example, that the final four will be the Hurricanes, Lightning, Stars and the Cinderella Kings, my 13-player, two-goalie entry might look like this:

(Positions based on NHL.com)

C: Sebastian Aho, Brayden Point, Anze Kopitar
RW: Nikita Kucherov, Andrei Svechnikov, Adrian Kempe
LW: Jason Robertson, Kevin Fiala, Jamie Benn
D: Victor Hedman, Miro Heiskanen, Brent Burns, Drew Doughty
G: Andrei Vasilevskiy, Jake Oettinger

Count: 3 Hurricanes, 4 Lightning, 4 Stars, 4 Kings

Note I picked goalies in opposite conferences and decided to spread out the rest of my roster the same way. 

If I wanted to really focus on just two teams but with a third team as an insurance policy, maybe my team looks like this:

C: Mika Zibanejad, Elias Pettersson, J.T. Miller
RW: Brock Boeser, William Nylander, Mitch Marner
LW: Artemi Panarin, Chris Kreider, Alexis Lafreniere
D: Quinn Hughes, Filip Hronek, Adam Fox, Morgan Rielly
G: Thatcher Demko, Igor Shesterkin

Count: 6 Rangers, 6 Canucks, 3 Maple Leafs

Obviously, my thinking is the Rangers and Canucks meet in the finals. With not much to pick from at RW, I've elected to fill out the rest of the roster with my dark horse, the Leafs. 

The notable omission in this setup is Auston Matthews, but if I don't think the Leafs aren't going all the way, then picking players on teams that will play more games is the smarter strategy. There have been exceptions, such as the 2021-22 season as I noted above when McDavid and Draisaitl outscored Makar, the Conn Smythe winner, despite playing fewer games. 

The same strategy can apply with the selection of Hronek. He may be a (distant) No. 2 option for the Canucks, but 20 games of Hronek at 0.61 points per game (12 points) is still far better than Evan Bouchard for seven games at 1.01 goals per game (7 points).