This late in the season, there’s already been lots of chatter about the NHL bye weeks. The NHL and NHLPA brought these in for the 2016-17 season for the first time so that players could have more rest, as many of them participated in the World Cup of Hockey in September. Each team is given a five-day ‘bye week’ during which the team cannot practice except on the fifth day if the team has a game on the sixth day.
Note that all statistics below are as of Wednesday, March 1.
How Have the Well-Rested Teams Fared?
It’s easy to conclude that a week off is a good thing. Teams get some much-needed rest and come out of the break refreshed and energized. Not quite. As of March 1, teams coming off a bye are 9-15-4. Let’s explore what’s happened in those games and what that means for daily fantasy sports.
Goals For
This season in all situations, the average goals per game per team is 2.74, and the total goals in a game are 5.50 (which helps explain why Vegas tends to set NHL over/unders at 5.5). Teams coming out of the bye week have scored fewer goals, albeit the sample is small. As of writing, 28 of the 30 NHL teams have had their bye weeks, averaging 2.54 goals per game off the bye and scoring more than two goals only 12 times. This difference of 0.20 goals per contest is fairly stark in a low-scoring game.
Goals Against
Unsurprisingly, teams coming off the bye were basically just as bad on defense as offense. In terms of Goals Against, the teams in this sample allowed 3.25 goals per game, 0.51 more than the league average (2.74). Half of the samples contained games in which the well-rested/bye team gave up four or more goals.
Goals Total
The total goals per game involving a team coming off a bye has been 5.79 goals — 0.29 more than the league average. While the rested teams haven’t scored at the same clip, their defensive shortcomings have allowed opposing teams to juice the overall goal total.
Results Against Bye
Let’s use the FantasyLabs Trends tool to see how high-upside players — high-volume shooters on relevant lines (top-three forward lines or top-two defense pairings) — do against teams coming off a bye. (Line information can be found via our Team Lines tool.)
Although the Plus/Minus is only +0.58, it represents an 18 percent increase in actual points vs. expected points, which is a significant number in a fairly low-event sport. In the NHL, scoring is very event-based and goal-dependent, so an 18 percent increase is a significant margin.
Results Against Non-Bye
How do high-upside players do against teams not coming off a full bye week?
High-upside players do remarkably better against bye week teams. The Opponent Plus/Minus Differential of +0.39 DraftKings points is significant, as is the difference in Consistency of 4.9 percentage points.
Stacking Against the Bye
This season high-upside players have been rostered at an ownership discount of 1.8 percentage points against teams coming out of a bye. Using the Lineup Builder in the Players Models, you should feel confident stacking against teams off the bye. (Pro users can review ownership trends via the DFS Ownership Dashboard to see if sharper high-stakes DFS players have exploited bye matchups.)
This late in the season, there are unfortunately only two more instances in which this knowledge can be applied, but keep it in mind for the future. Next season the NHL is looking to make some changes to the bye week schedule, but as long as an active team is playing a bye-week team, this trend will be very useful.
Also, this probably doesn’t need to be said, but consider fading teams coming off the bye week.
