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

Filipovich.

Welcome to the Hockeyedio cast. My name is Demetri Fri Filipovich and joining me is my good buddy Sean Shapiro. Sean. What's going on, man? Not too much, man. I'm in the, I'm recording from the lounge and Little Seasers Arena, one of our favorite places to this show. And as you can maybe hear it in the the background there's a little more noise than usual

it's uh higer's opening day or i guess almostener or whatever today at the same time as

wings game here tonight so a little more energy around me right now as opposed to our normal

quiet stuff but i'm good and i'm happy to be here i'm going to treat that as a studio audience and

the fact that the pdfast is blowing up and we've got people now sitting in on these episodes that you and I record.

I'm feeling like out myself, as you might be able to tell from my voice, but the show goes on.

And the good thing is, you know, because we had such a strong regular season here on the PDO cast, we've already had the good fortune of locking up our playoff spot so we can use these last couple weeks of the regular season to iron some stuff out to get into peak shape for the postseason and to be ready for game one of the playoffs.

So that's what we're doing here today.

But I thought it'd be fun to have you on to kind of take stock of where things are currently at in the east, but also bounce around a variety of

random topics that you've been writing about recently that I've sort of, I've had this,

whatever, 10 days or so off now. And generally the way my brain works is I use that time

instead of actually stepping away from hockey and relaxing and recovering, I'm like mulling over

like, huh, the Tampa Bay Lightning,

are they good again? I'm bouncing around all these different topics on my head, so we're going

to get into some of those things that have been on my mind while I've been off. Let's start with

the Eastern Conference wildcard race, though. We've got this battle for the two remaining playoff

spots, right? The third seed in the metro, the second wildcard

spot. There's a big grouping of teams all of a sudden now that are jockeying for it with

the penguins becoming the latest entrenched into it. I guess I'm curious for your take on how

excited you are kind of following this because obviously one of the teams involved in it is

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