This is the Jeff Merrick Show on the SportsNet Radio Network.

Welcome back to the program.

We'll get on the Buffalo Sabres page coming up in hours two.

They fired their head coach, Don Granato.

Earlier today, we'll get on that one with Mike Giselo from the hockey news.

In the meantime,

you know, depending on the way things break here in the next couple of days, the Los Angeles

Kings will either face off against the Edmonton Oilers or the Dallas Stars in the opening

round. Daryl Evans, a long-time analyst for Los Angeles Kings, joins me now. Daryl, how are you today, sir?

Absolutely wonderful.

Getting ready for some playoff hockey.

You and me both, but there's a lot of intrigues still to go.

Like, how would you, like we're following this East, you know, this turtle race,

you know, teams going backwards outside of the Islanders who go 8-1 and 1 to wrap up the third of the Metropolitan.

Things kind of crawled along there as no one seemed to want any spot in the eastern conference how would you describe what we've seen in the west

because it's it's quite different it's kind of like what the east was last year yeah it has changed

quite a bit uh you know the parody in the nchel just continues to keep getting greater and greater each year. The West has been interesting. You look at the portion of the St. Louis Blues made for the last few weeks and they fell a little bit short. But, you know, it's been really interesting to see the way it's all played out. The jockeying for the top positions has gone, you know, basically down to the wire. So I think there's going to be a lot of interesting matchups. I always look at the first round of the playoffs is the hardest round because everybody's trying to get settled in. And I kind of get a little bit of a groove going because it's a whole different platform from the regular season. So it'll be interesting to see the way it all plays out,

but there's still a couple of big games left to make the final decisions.

Absolutely.

And I know that picking your opponent is always a dangerous game to play.

There are many that we're wondering about, you know,

the Boston Bruins game last night against the Capitals

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