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

Welcome to the Hockey Pediocast. My name is Dmitri Filipovichovich and joining me as my good buddy, Harmon, Dylem, what's going on in?

I'm jacked up for the start of the season. It's been, I can't even say a fun first week because it hasn't been a first, like a full week yet, but at least a fun few first days.

Yeah, you got three days worth of games, of course, in classic and HL fashion. They form out of the schedule so that there were 14 games

on Thursday and it was just an absolute frenzy trying to keep up with it all as we're recording

on Friday, zero tonight, up to 60 and everyone's in action on Saturday,

and then just the one on Sunday. I thought the plan for today, you know, this is the last show

we're going to do this week for opening week. So I thought we'd kind of bounce around,

got some notes as I was trying to keep up with everything on Thursday, some of the stuff we

saw from those games, maybe a few things that either stood out,

surprised us, vindicated our preconceived notions, or just stuff to kind of watch moving forward.

And then on the back half, if we have time, I want to get into some of the recent articles

you've written up on the athletic and maybe some of the, I guess, ramifications of the recent big name extensions we've seen and

their impact on the market and some of the business side of things there. Let's start with

Thursday night's action, though. And I've got about five or six games. I wanted to run through

with you here. The first one was Senators Lightning. And it was a really fun one. The Lightning jump out to a 2-0 lead, then they're up 3-1. At first intermission, the Sends come roaring back, wind up winning 5-4. And it wasn't necessarily surprising in the sense that the Lightning cooked offensively the way you'd expect, right? All four of their goals came from essentially that top line

combination and power play. I think three of them were either with the man advantage or with the

extra attacker outlaid. And it was that classic sort of, you know, movement pucks flying around.

A few set plays with Burke Strand cutting back door, a couple of high tips,

Kucharov obviously doing his thing from his office.

So that was the good part for me, the bad part for me.

And maybe this dovetails a little bit as a tease for later on in today's show when we're going to talk about the defense tiers that you wrote up on the athletic

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