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

Welcome to the Hockey PEDEOCast. My name is Dmitra Filipovich, and joining me to close out the week, my good buddy, Steve Ware here. Steve, what's going on? Hey, Dimitri, what's up? I'm excited for this one. It's been a while since you and I have had a chance to catch up on here. And I feel like in particular with all the changing business dynamics we've seen influencing player movement.

We either have or haven't seen since the start of last offseason, really, with the cap going

up, the new CBA on the horizon, I thought it would be useful for us to dig into some of the

most actionable and pertinent elements of it all and kind of the considerations currently ongoing

behind the scenes in NHL front offices.

And to start the conversation, we're going to dig into the PDO cast Discord mailback because

we've got a couple of fun questions that I think are great launching points for us.

And they kind of go hand in hand.

But the first one is, what do you think is or will bog down trades more moving forward?

The rising cap, keeping more teams in the buying conversation,

or the amount of non-star players with considerable trade protection?

And the second line it goes,

if trade protection was a value add when the cap was flat,

will the volume of them go down moving forward now that the cap is going up,

or does everyone just expect it at this point? A lot to unpack there. I'll give you the floor here. What do you think is the most interesting part of that? And where do you think we should start today's conversation? Sure. Let's take those questions in reverse. Number one, I think the horses sort of left the stable, so to speak, on trade protection, at least for now.

Like, you know, it's a copycat league. There's been a major consolidation among a handful of major agencies.

And so the tendency will be for, like, the next deal to look like the last deal, so to speak.

And as trade protection has sort of evolved from something a few get to something,

you know,

that many players get,

I think it's going to continue to be more prevalent-ish.

...