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

Welcome to the Hockey PEDEOCast. My name is Dmitra Filipovich and joining me here, as always, on a Sunday for our Sunday special, my good buddy Thomas Strands. Tom, what's going on, man?

Not much, buddy. Doing well. You know, we're sort of settling in now for the stretch run. The folly of the NHL standing system, I think, is laid plain now, especially

in the Western Conference.

The Department of Player Safety is taking some serious shots from star players, Connor

McDavid.

And agents.

Connor McDavid and Austin Matthews agents chiming in in a significant way.

The Buffalo Sabres continue to be a division leading team.

In fact, opening up their lead, just as we all expected in early December.

It's been a lot of fun.

Like, it's looking like we're going to have some meaningful playoff races out east and out west.

I think more out east.

Just because I don't know that the second wildcard, those teams are like as interesting to me,

generally speaking, and the playoff bar is going to be, what, 10 points lower?

Yeah, I was talking about this with Harmon.

We were looking at the Western Conference playoff race on friday and he's like yeah all of these teams involved

have amongst the easiest strength of schedule the rest of the way and i'm like yeah because they're

all playing each other right and every model is going to rate all of them very poorly and so

the competition is soft but in theory I guess the competition is the teams that

are vying for playoff spots.

So it'll be competitive, but ultimately the significance of it is probably less impactful

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