Regressing to the mean since 2015, it's the Hockey PEDEOCast with your host, Dmitri Filipovich.

Welcome to the Hockey PEOCast. My name is Ditra Filipovich. And here's a plan for today's show.

So initially, we were going to rerun an oldie but goody interview that I'd done last year with Rickard Gromberg as today's show.

And we still will do that in a couple minutes here. But before we get to it, I had to quickly record a little intro, at least giving my initial reactions

to the news that the Detroit Red Wings had placed Akabrana on waivers because it's a topic

that's very near to my heart. As people who have followed my work for the past couple of years,

know he is one of my favorite players in the league to watch i've been talking up

how good of a player he is and how valuable he is and how excited i am by him for years now and so

obviously this year has been incredibly worrisome you know first and foremost all it really matters

here is yakovana the person not the player and it's's great to see that, you know, he was willing and able to take the steps necessary

to enter the player assistance program, to get help, to work on himself, to figure things out

off of the ice.

And it seems like he's working towards that.

We've only seen him play two games in the NHL so far this year.

We've seen him play, or he has played a couple games in the HL for the Grand Rapids,

the Red Wings, AHL affiliate so far.

And it seems like he certainly still got a long road ahead of him,

in particular in terms of getting back up to speed to be able to physically

play at the NHL level in an NHL game action. And so there's that component to this. I was really

surprised by this honestly because I just didn't see a player of his caliber being put on waivers at

this point, even acknowledging, you know, all of the other contextual factors.

And so I reached out to a number of people to try to, you know, suss out and figure out what they

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