Regressing to the mean since 2015, it's the Hockey P.D.O.cast with your host, Dmitri Filipovich.

Welcome to the Hockey PEOCast. My name is Dimitri Filipovich. And. He's my good buddy, John Mattis. John, what's going on, man? Not a whole lot. Christmas is coming. World Juniors is coming. And yeah, it's been a long week, but this is getting me fired up. You got me fired up in our conversation in our DMs. I feel like you're you're amped for this.

I am.

You know what else is coming up?

Roughly the mid-season mark of the NHL season.

We're still maybe a couple weeks out.

But teams are going to be hitting the 40 game mark here soon,

which means we're about halfway through the regular season.

And I thought that was a good point for us to do a fun little

exercise. We did this a couple years ago, I believe, and it was kind of constructing our all-NHL

teams or our all-star teams. And we're going to do the top three. We're going to be disciplined

about assigning correct positions in terms of handedness and where guys actually play.

And I feel like it's going to serve as like a good sort of time capsule or maybe something

we can bookmark for down the road and revisiting it at the end of the season to kind of have

like a good feel for where we were at at this point of the season. I think it's important for us to distinguish as well that we're going to try to capture

the contributions and production and play of players through this first half of the season.

So these lists are necessarily going to be our projections for what it's going to look like

at the end of the season,

obviously with a lot of season left and, you know, a trade like the Quinn Hughes one, obviously,

I think boosting the value of a lot of the Minnesota wild players in particular.

A lot of these guys are probably going to wind up shooting up once they get more games stacked together.

But I thought this would be a really fun way for us to kind of get into the holiday break and revisit what's gone on so far this season. And so we're going to start with our first team. I was wondering kind of what made more sense, whether we want to build up the dramatic hype of starting with the third team. And then people figuring out, all right, who's going to wind up making it at the very top. But let's start with the best players because you and I generally tend to go long,

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