Slafkovsky’s Development as a Player, the Sharks New Look Top Line, Celebrini’s Role on Team Canada, and Tampa Bay’s Defensive Results

The Hockey PDOcast

Sportsnet

Nhl, Sports, Hockey, Sportsnet

4.8 • 920 Ratings

🗓️ 2 January 2026

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dimitri Filipovic is joined by Jack Han to discuss Juraj Slafkovsky's development as a playmaker this season, the way Macklin Celebrini and Igor Chernyshov are playing together, Celebrini's ideal role on Team Canada at this year's Olympics, the difficulty of accurately evaluating defensive play for young players, the reasons the Devils are struggling to create 5v5 offense, and how the Lightning have been able to churn out the defensive results they have despite all of their injuries on the back-end.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Regressing to the mean since 2015, it's the Hockey PEDEOCast with your host, Dmitri Filipovich.
0:19.4	Welcome to the HockeyPedocast. My name is Dmitri Filipovich, And joining me is my good buddy, Jack on. Jack, what's going on? Happy New Year. We're into 2026. Happy New Year, indeed. wishing all of our listeners, a very happy new year. Hopefully, they had a nice celebration the other day. We're going to start 2026 with a really fun show. We've got a loaded list of topics that we want to get through today. A lot of them kind of stemming around player
0:43.2	development and skill sets and kind of getting the most, especially out of young players. And we're
0:47.8	going to go through the league and cover some interesting names that have popped up recently.
0:52.4	I wanted to start with Yer Aslovsky, Ivan Demit of, the Habs in general,
0:58.0	because they're coming off this, or they're still on a road trip, but it's been very impressive
1:02.3	to date.
1:02.9	They had a 6-2 win in Boston in the final game before the holiday break.
1:06.4	Then they come out of that break.
1:07.5	They take 5 out of 6 possible points at Tampa Bay, Florida.
1:11.6	Carolina most recently coming back with a couple monster third period surges throughout.
1:16.4	They're up to six in the league in points percentage, just one point back of Tampa Bay
1:20.4	and Atlantic through 40 games.
1:21.9	And I think the most encouraging development to me this year for the HABs beyond obviously
1:27.2	the stats I just cited about where they are in the standings to date is the development of Uri-S.
1:33.4	Likovsky, and in particular his play as kind of an on-puck creator in his fourth NHL season.
1:40.2	His work as a facilitator and distributor, in my opinion, is one of the largest individual
1:45.7	improvements I've seen on tape this year across the entire league. And I wanted to get into that
1:50.5	with you because obviously he's a player playing for the HABs that you're very familiar with. And I feel
1:54.6	like this is right up your alley in terms of this type of individual skill set improvement this year.
2:01.1	So what are you seeing from him and kind of what we can attribute that to
2:03.8	and what we can take away from it as it's going on right now?
	...

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