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

Filipovich.

Welcome to the Hockey PEOCast.

My name is Dimitra Filipovich, and joining me is my good buddy Thomas Drands, Tom.

What's going on?

Oh, no much, bud.

I think last time we spoke, actually, you said that the sample size you like to, you prefer to have a confidence in a team's performance is around the 30 game mark.

Yeah.

And that's pretty much exactly where we are right now, essentially every team, except for I

believe the Ottawa senators have played at least 30 games so far this season.

And so what we're going to do is we're going to go through the Western Conference today.

Initially, I thought we did the full league, but I think we should split this up just

so we could have a thorough and proper conversation and give each team its due diligence. And so we're

going to start with the West today. When we come back in the new year, you and I will reconvene and

we'll do the East. And we're going to go through the top teams, the ones that we believe will

factor into the Stanley Cup conversation and have a legitimate chance to compete for the Stanley Cup the season.

And we're going to present the bear and the bull case for each one in terms of why,

if you want to talk yourself into being high on them as a contender, you can. And if there's some reservation or red flags or reasons for potential concern, why that would be the case, too.

Let's go. So who do you want to start with? Do you want to do this in terms of division?

Do you want to do it in terms of the betting odds, how the market sees these teams?

Yeah, well, so first of all, if you go to bet the Stanley Cup winner will come from which conference, right?

You'll get longer odds out of the east than you will out of the west.

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