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As many of you have seen in fantasy football, match-ups in the final weeks can make or break your team. So why not apply that to fantasy hockey? It does not matter what strategy you typically employ - my strategy in H2H leagues is to try to win five, if not six, of the offensive categories and do my best to pull out a win in a few of the goalie categories. If you do something different, then that is fine... the following will show you how to maximize your chance of getting a win in the offensive categories.

First and foremost, I looked at which is a good team to play against in terms of a typical fantasy league. Obviously, teams that allow a lot of goals provide the greatest benefit. In this thinking, four categories benefit directly (goals, assists, plus/minus, powerplay points) and one semi-directly (shots/shooting percentage) when your player's teams are able to score more goals than usual. This leaves you to figure out how to win the Penalty Minutes category (pick up a goon for a few games). As an aside, I have always felt that goals against average, save percentage, and shutouts are somewhat left to chance as it is. Even a great goaltender can have a bad game and ruin your week in GAA and SV%, and there is no reliable way to predict shutouts.

In turn, this gives us Carolina, Toronto, Atlanta, Tampa Bay, Washington, Ottawa, Los Angeles, and Edmonton as favorable teams for your fantasy players to play against. Other than Ottawa, there are no surprises in that group. Using the same criteria, the teams you do not want to be matched up against are New Jersey, NY Rangers, Detroit, San Jose, and Vancouver. So, for Weeks 24 through 27, if a team plays two or more games against the favorable teams, then they get a +1 in this study... and if they play two or more games against the unfavorable, the teams get a -1.

I could have stopped there, but I wanted to take into account the argument of streaming in leagues with unlimited moves. Streaming involves adding players who will be playing the next day, therefore giving you a full roster each night. Obviously in your fantasy league's playoffs, you could stream players and not have to worry about match-ups at all if your league allows unlimited transaction. Nevertheless, the players you are streaming generally are not as valuable as the core of your roster. So, in order to extend this theory a bit further, we will look at how many games each team plays in a given week. Certain teams play four games, while others play only two each week, so for weeks in which a team plays only two games, they receive a -1 in this study, and for four games, they get a +1. If you can build your core with players who play more often, you can maximize the production from star players and minimize the need for streaming.

Therefore, after combining all of the data, we come up with a list... (Read the full article here: Favorable Match-ups in Fantasy Hockey`s Home Stretch)