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

Welcome to the Hockeypedio cast. My name is Demetri Filipovich, and joining me is my good buddy, Pete Blackbird. Pete, what's going on, man?

How are you? Thanks for having me back. I'm excited. It's a Friday here, and we have to close out the week with some fun.

And listen, we're, what, 22 sleeps away now until the playoffs kickoff and it's going to be here before you know it.

And so in anticipation of that, I thought you and I today could do a little bit of a draft where we pick our Brown 1 matchups we're most excited for and kind of go through and back and forth.

Now, we're talking about this before we went on the air.

I know I gave you this homework assignment. You, of course, delivered by making a whole laundry list of potential matchups. Some are more likely than others. I think the only criteria is they have to be mathematically possible still, both in terms of seating and also involving teams who actually have a chance to make the playoffs. But other than that, we can get as crazy as you want or as realistic as you want. So I've got a list of my own. I'm going to give you the floor here. You're the guest. You can have first pick. And then we'll go back and forth and in draft order. All right. First pick. And it's a little boring because I think it's the one that most people are looking forward to when they look at the standings right now.

It's got to be like Central 2 versus 3.

And right now that's Stars versus Wild. And that one to me has not only the top hockey quality appeal, but it also has the additional

layer of like, hey, is Jason Robertson going to try to kill Bill Garon in this series?

And like that to me adds a little bit of juice, but it's just two of the best teams in the NHL.

And knowing that there are, there's a three-headed monster in the central division and whoever wins

that series is probably likely going to play uh the avalanche or whoever wins that division

like that is going to be the one series that if i had to recommend one series to like a neutral

fan or somebody entering in for the playoffs. I said,

got to watch that series. I think that's objectively the correct first pick, especially

with the criteria of quality of hockey. It's the third versus the six team in terms of points

percentage. You could look at it from the perspective of chaos, especially for around one,

because every night there's going to be, what, four or five games on, and generally there's going to be a lot of overlap.

And so I think we're looking for, you know, stuff that's going to differentiate itself from the rest. And that might not necessarily be a highly competitive two one game.

I think one of the perks of around one is you get some of these crazy

lopsided matchups, but also ones where it's two teams who aren't realistically going to compete

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