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

Welcome to the Hockey PEDEOCast. My name is Dimitri Villapovichich and joining me is my buddy John Mattis. John, what's going on, man?

Hey, not much. Here we are, what, week and a half into the playoffs. How are you feeling like, are you,

are you just in the middle of the grind? Are you kind of all in on this thing right now?

Yeah, I mean, round one is the best, right? Because you're getting, it's slowing down a little bit now because they're spacing out the series of giving teams an extra day off like between his game four and five or whatever for the most part. But yeah, you're generally getting four awesome games every single night. So that's very cool. As an analyst, I prefer round two, I think, because you cut it in half and it gives you

just more sort of room to think about this stuff more critically and take time with each

series and let it soak in a little bit.

And also you get more sample size of them playing playoff games as well, right?

So you start getting closer to like the 10 game range for a lot of these teams.

And it's like, all right, now I can meaningful data to work with.

But for fans and from like an entertainment perspective, round one of the NHL playoffs is like unmatched in my opinion. Yeah, I feel like every year there's a tweet that ends up in my

feed that's like someone who doesn't watch hockey and is in the States or wherever like a non-hockey

market. And they're like, this is wild. I can't believe what's happening in the NHL right now.

Does this happen every year? It's like, yeah. The first two weeks of the playoffs is is bonkers. Absolutely. Yeah, especially when you get into playoff overtime. That's when the good stuff comes out.

Okay. So this is the plan for today, John. We are going to do a mailbag. We've opened it up.

We've gotten some listener questions, some really fun ones, some really like thought-provoking,

alternate universe, hypothetical ones, which is always great. It gives us a chance to dream big

and have some fun with

it. So we'll see how many of these we can get through. I've picked out around like seven or eight of

them. Hopefully, you and I always run long and we'll probably only get to like three or four of them,

but we'll do our best here. So here's question one. And this is, I think the best banger of the bunch. So we're going to start off really strong here, totally offside asks.

If you can build a starting lineup of only players on current playoff teams, who would you choose?

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