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

Filipovich.

Welcome to the Hockey PEOCast. My name is Dmitra Filipovich and joining me in studio, my good buddy Thomas Trans. Tom, what's going on in?

Dmitri?

Another Sunday special on a Monday?

Yes, so apologies for that. This time it's my fault.

Usually it's because you're on the road covering the Canucks and we have to move stuff around.

In this case, I took a very rare weekend away from the NHL. Good for you, brother. I went to Defino with the family, had a lovely time, came back Sunday evening, and I've just been mainlining weekend hockey ever since. I think I'm ready to go. I've caught up on everything. It was a fun weekend of games. There was a lot to get through. The Pacific Division Pillow Fight for me was a highlight quote. But man, there was a lot of fun hockey and a lot of funny storylines that sort of permeated this weekend's games. Excited to get into it all. And I mean, capping it off with, I believe, the final game of the bunch was Duck Sabres, a thrilling 6-5 overtime win for the Ducks, which is a game just designed for our personal interests here. And we're going to try not to do a full show on it, even though I think we're both tempted to, because we got a fun little gimmick here today. We did this last year, I think earlier in the season, but we're about four weeks out from the playoffs.

And I thought a good way to start thinking about it and kind of take stock where we're at

within the league's hierarchy would be to bring back our stakes tiers for this coming postseason.

Now it essentially is the concept is who is the most to gain or lose relative to the rest of the league and their

competition either because of how pot committed they are for being all in this year or what

you know lessons they can take from whatever happens however far they go i feel like we're

one for one so far because last year we were very adamant that

the Winnipeg Jets were atop our list.

Yeah.

And, you know, they won the president's trophy.

They were first in the league.

But beyond that, our reasoning behind, you know, Nikola Eilers being a UFA, the cap going up

and our skepticism, they'd be on the forefront of teams maximizing all their potential spending power all that sort of stuff and sure enough now they're what with the six best lottery odds and obviously not competing in this year's playoffs so we're one for one we're going to see what we can do this year um i've got it sorted into like four kind of general tiers, and we can work our way up like from the bottom in terms of... Although that's going to mean that we spend an awful lot of time on the Columbus Blue Jackets. Well, it will. And especially because most of the teams are condensed in the lower tiers, especially with the fact that as we record, we still don't even know who the 16 playoff teams are because there's a bunch of playoff races in both conferences. But we're going to try to talk our way through it. And if anything, it's just going to give us an opportunity to cover the full league and kind of figure out where we're at right now. So do you want to get it going? Yeah. Well, do you want me to pick a team? Or do you want to get it going as you're going to present to me? Okay, I've got tier one or tier four, depending on how you want to structure it. The happy to be here slash good experience for our players. Yeah, perfect. And I've got 11 teams in here. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Out West.

Okay.

We got the San Jose Sharks.

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