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

Welcome to the HockeyPedioCast. My name is Dmitra Fulipovichovich and joining me is my good buddy, Jesse Granger. Jesse, what's going on, man?

Not much. It is the best time of the year. It is an exhausting time of the year, traveling back and forth from city to city, but I've gotten used to it at this point covering the nights. I'm a veteran to deep playoff runs and it's it's fun to watch a lot of

playoff hockey in person. Well, you've got a a fun trip to Denver ahead of you this week. But before

we get there, we've got hapsabers game seven on the schedule Monday night. I had your colleague at

the athletic, Arpin Basu, on the Patreon feed this morning.

We broke that down and set that game up. So if you'd like to hear more on the East matchup, subscribe to the show there and check it out. While we wait for the East Final, though, to get sorted, we've got the West Final to look forward to. Aves, Golden Knights, getting going on Wednesday night. And so I thought I'd have you on for the two of us to look ahead to that matchup, kind of set the table for breaking down some of the most interesting things to watch for,

everything you need to know about the two teams and the way they line up against each other.

Let's start here with the fun stuff.

The battle atop the lineup, the chess match that we're anticipating

in terms of how the Golden Knights are going to try to corral and slow down Nathan McKinnon,

which the Wild certainly weren't able to do. The Kings were to some extent early in the series,

but ultimately didn't matter in that four-game sweep. And then in the regular season,

no one could really do anything against him five on five.

I'm curious for your take on how the Golden Knights and John Tortorella are going to try to

approach this from a matchup perspective.

Do you assume like I do that we're going to see a lot of Jack Eichel trying to essentially

mirror him and tail him around the ice. Do you think

they're going to try to do so by wearing him down and making them defend through the cycle game

in the offensive zone? Do you think we'll see some William Carlson on him? What do you anticipate

the sort of game plan is at least heading into the series? Yeah, that's going to be one of the most interesting decisions they have to make. And obviously, with the series starting up in Colorado, it might be a little tougher for them to get that matchup that they want in the first two games. So we may even have to wait until the series shifts back to T-Mobile for game three and four before we see truly what torterella wants. But I think Vegas is in a

good spot where they're, I don't know if they're going to match up hard on that. I think they might

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