NHL Best Ball Strategy: Draft A Winning Fantasy Hockey Team

Every fall, drafters walk into NHL best ball lobbies and pay full price for names. The winning NHL best ball strategy we drilled on our live Best Puck draft shows, built on the same projections, ownership and top stacks data behind our NHL DFS coverage, is different: buy the four things the market consistently misprices, which are stable goaltending, ice time, peripheral scoring, and playoff-schedule volume. Get those four right and the names take care of themselves.

The Quick Answer

The core NHL best ball strategy is to draft goalies a round earlier than feels comfortable, prioritize players whose minutes and shot/hit/block volume give them a nightly floor, and build team stacks from clubs with the most games in the best ball playoff weeks. Below, we walk through each pillar with the real numbers from our live drafts, plus a full draft board showing how a four-man stack comes together in practice.

What Is NHL Best Ball?

Best ball is fantasy hockey with the season-long headache removed. You draft a full roster before the season, and from that point the platform automatically counts your best-scoring players at each position every scoring period. No waivers, no lineup setting, no trades. Your edge is spent entirely at the draft table, which is exactly why strategy matters more here than in any other fantasy hockey format.

On Underdog Fantasy, the NHL version runs as Best Puck: snake drafts, a regular-season points phase, then a playoff structure across the final six weeks of the NHL regular season, split into two-week advancement stretches. Demand is real, too. In the peak preseason weeks of our live shows, draft lobbies that once took hours to fill were filling in five to 15 minutes. If you have never used the platform, start with our guide to how Underdog Fantasy works, then come back for the hockey-specific edges. New drafters can also grab a signup offer through our Underdog Fantasy promo code page.

One structural point drives everything that follows: because rosters lock at the draft, every pick is a bet on a full season of usage. That makes projectable workload the most valuable stat in the player pool, and it is where we start.

Pillar 1: Draft Goalies Earlier Than The Room Wants To

Start with a market lesson straight from our draft room. In one preseason of Best Puck drafts, the earliest boards in late July showed almost no goalies in the first two rounds. By the final week before puck drop, drafts were seeing six goalies inside the first 33 picks. The market repriced the position in about six weeks.

Why? Uncertainty. That preseason, three netminders who could have been top-five fantasy goalies all carried real question marks at draft time: one was coming off back surgery, one was still unsigned deep into training camp, and one was a major question mark heading into camp. When the top of a scarce position gets shaky, the stable starters get expensive fast, and drafters who waited on the position were left picking through timeshares.

Two rules fall out of that:

1. Secure your goalies inside the first six rounds when the position is uncertain. One of our drafters put it simply on the show: he knows he can find winger and defenseman value between picks 140 and 160, so he spends his early capital on the position where late value dries up.
2. Goalie scoring runs through wins, so team quality is the filter. A talented young starter on a rebuilding club is a trap. We backed off a promising young starter that season for exactly this reason: his team profiled to finish out of the playoff race, and a goalie who does not win does not score, no matter how many saves he makes.

Draft rule: when a scarce position gets uncertain at the top, the market reprices it mid-preseason. Beat the reprice by taking your goalies a round before it feels comfortable, and only from teams that will win.

The goalie decision is really a usage decision, and the same logic extends to skaters: you are not drafting talent in a vacuum, you are drafting deployment. That brings us to minutes.

Pillar 2: Minutes Are The Master Stat

Ice time is to best ball what salary is to DFS: the constraint everything else lives inside. A skater cannot pile up shots, hits, and blocks from the bench.

The clearest example from our drafts was a defenseman we kept targeting as a top-10 option at the position even though he projected for maybe 12 or 13 goals. After his team traded away two veteran blueliners, he was skating close to 25 minutes a night, and at that workload a defenseman can push 200 shots, 200 blocks and 200 hits in a season. Those extra minutes mattered more than the shooting-percentage regression everyone expected.

The same logic cuts the other way as a warning, and it sets up the draft board waiting at the end of this guide: the market pays for names and highlights, but the scoreboard pays for minutes. On the show we broke down a hyped rookie winger going in the 70s overall whose realistic deployment was about 17 minutes a night under a demanding coach. Our math said a top-75 finish in Underdog points per game required roughly a 30-goal, 40-assist, 230-shot season, something no rookie had done in nearly two decades, and the last one to do it stepped straight into 19-plus minutes as a rookie. Meanwhile, another rookie center with a comparable ceiling was going around pick 150. Same archetype, half the price.

That is the whole ADP game in one comparison: when two players share an outcome range, take the one the room is ignoring.

Defense is where name-brand drafting costs the most. Elite offensive defensemen get drafted on reputation, but in this format a blueliner who does not shoot or block loses value fast, and almost any defenseman outside the true top handful can lose his power-play role midseason. Our drafters consistently passed on the famous names going in the early rounds and took the next tier, the 20-minute, power-play-one defensemen falling rounds later, arguing that tier had a comparable chance at a top-five positional finish.

Pillar 3: Peripherals Build Your Floor

Scoring in this format pays for more than goals, and the drafters who internalize that own the middle rounds.

The archetype we kept coming back to was a power forward who averaged over three hits and a block per game the prior season while living on his team's top power-play unit. Add his shot volume and that profile carries roughly a 3.5-point nightly floor on Underdog before he ever scores. With thin depth on his wing, he was locked into 18 to 19 minutes whether the coach liked it or not. We ranked that player a top-50 winger while the room let him fall far later, purely because his box-score line does not lead SportsCenter.

The flip side: a legendary goal scorer coming off a down year still projected well for us, not because we expected another 50-goal season, but because 35 to 40 goals on huge shot volume plus physical play keeps the floor high even in decline. Peripherals age better than finishing.

This is also where good projections separate from guesswork. Season-long shot, hit and block rates are far more stable than goal totals, and in the Stokastic NHL DataHub the tool surfaces exactly those rates alongside NHL projections, ownership and top stacks once the season is live. If you want to see how simulation-driven projections work before committing, you can try the Sims free.

Our full NHL package, with the projections, ownership and top stacks behind these rankings, is 10% off with code NHLBESTBALL10.

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Pillar 4: Stack The Teams The Schedule Loves

Stacking, drafting multiple players from one team so one big night scores across your roster, works in best ball just as it does in NHL DFS lineup building. But best ball adds a wrinkle DFS does not have: the playoff schedule.

Your best ball playoffs are the final six weeks of the NHL regular season, and teams do not play equal schedules in that window. In the season from our live drafts, only four teams had more than 20 games across the three playoff stretches. This is how that board looked:

The row that mattered most to us was Minnesota: 21 games with 13 at home is a scheduling gift, because volume is the one edge that survives cold streaks. A stacked team playing three games in a playoff week gets three chances to spike while a two-game team gets two, and no amount of talent buys back a missing game.

The second consideration is draft cost. Buffalo kept showing up in our builds that season not because we loved the team most, but because its stackable pieces were spread out: a No. 1 defenseman in round 2 or 3, a high-volume center in round 5, a top-six winger in rounds 6-7. You could assemble a four-man stack without ever reaching. Compare that with a team whose three best players all go inside the first two rounds, where stacking means torching your draft capital in one place.

One discipline note: four players from one team inside your first seven picks is too concentrated for a single entry you care about. Across a portfolio of 15 to 20 teams, though, you want at least one aggressive version of your favorite stack. Concentration is a portfolio decision, not a per-draft rule.

Worked Example: A Real Draft Board With A Four-Man Buffalo Stack

All four pillars came together in the final live draft from our show that preseason, picking from the No. 9 slot.

True to the goalie-early habit from Pillar 1, the board banked three netminders, one of them landing inside the stack itself. And the stack came together exactly along the spread-out cost curve from Pillar 4: Rasmus Dahlin in round 3, Tage Thompson in round 5, goalie Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen in round 6 and Alex Tuch in round 7. Four Sabres in seven rounds, no reaches, every skater tied to the same top power-play unit and the goalie riding the same team's wins, on one of the four clubs with a 20-plus-game playoff window. Remember the schedule table above? It is the reason this stack existed at all.

The late rounds added the low-cost lottery tickets that finish best ball rosters. A suspended star winger due back in mid-November of that season went in the final round, cheap because drafters hate waiting, valuable because his return slotted him straight back onto a loaded top power play. The last four rounds also squeezed in a two-man stack of a prized rookie center and a defenseman teammate, upside that costs nothing at the end of a draft.

Notice what the board did not do: it never paid full price for a name. Every pick bought minutes, peripherals, schedule, or a discounted path to all three.

FAQ

What is NHL best ball? A draft-only fantasy hockey format. You draft a roster before the season, the platform automatically counts your best scorers each period, and there are no waivers or lineup moves. On Underdog Fantasy it runs as Best Puck.

When should I draft goalies in NHL best ball? Earlier than the room. When the top of the position carries injury or contract uncertainty, stable starters on good teams belong inside your first six rounds. Goalie scoring is win-driven, so avoid even talented starters on teams that will not win often.

How many players should I stack from one team? Three or four is the practical band, built from teams whose pieces are spread across rounds so you never reach. Save the most aggressive versions for a multi-entry portfolio rather than a single roster.

Is best ball the same as DFS? No. Best ball is one draft graded over a full season; DFS re-prices every slate. The player-evaluation skills transfer both ways, and our NHL DFS strategy guide covers the nightly version of the same edges. Newer players may want the NHL DFS beginner guide first.

In Summary

NHL best ball hands you one lever, the draft, so every pick has to buy something real. Take goalies before scarcity taxes you, treat ice time as the master stat, pay for shot, hit and block floors the market ignores, and point your stacks at the teams with the fattest playoff-week schedules. The names on the jerseys are the last consideration, not the first. It is the same price-versus-value discipline that wins across formats, and if football is your sport, the identical framework runs through our NFL best ball draft strategy guide.

Watch The Video

Everything above comes from our live Best Puck strategy show, where we drafted a real team pick by pick, including the four-man Buffalo stack, while talking through every decision. Watch on YouTube.

Ready to put real projections behind your drafts? The Stokastic NHL package includes the projections, ownership and top stacks data we build every board from, and code NHLBESTBALL10 takes 10% off.

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