Puck Soup - Sean Takes a Victory Lap

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

Sticks and hits and goals and saves and slap shots and goons. We've got sportly commentary to whatever you commute. But we also cover movies, TV shows, it's in tunes. It's your weekly bowl of hockey and nonsense. Park two. Hey, everybody. It's Sean here doing the intro, because Greg is not with us this week. By that, he means Greg died.

All right. Greg died, but it's fine. We're good. Ryan and I are still here, and we have a special guest host who will introduce himself in a second. But yeah, I'm Sean McAnneux from The Athletic, and there's probably a bunch of catchphrases and stuff I'm supposed to say in the intro, but I don't know what they are because I don't listen to the podcast. So I'm just going to say hello to Ryan Lambert. Hey, I'm Ryan Lambert from EP Rinkside. I also don't really want to get into a whole catch.

phrase thing. And we should introduce our special guest host who's going to say hello right now. Hey, this is Sean Jatili from the Athletic and the NHL on TNT. Just took a job as the studio analyst for their game broadcast for the upcoming season. Very excited to announce that here. Yeah, and as long as nobody else more famous becomes available. What's important is I have a ton of experience and a ton of charisma and I'll do a great job. And those are the most important things you can get when you're hiring a TV person.

Yeah, exactly. When you're hiring a TV person, your first thought should be, has this person ever been good on television? And as long as they have. Okay, so Wayne Gretzky quits the Edmonton Oilers, which I think we would all agree is generally a good move. Anytime you can pull it off. It was a shocking moment to me because I didn't realize Wayne Gretzky worked for the Edmonton Oilers, but apparently this is something he'd been doing for five years. Who hired him?

Was he like a Bob Nicholson hire? Like who even knows? That's a classic Bob Nicholson hire. I mean, see, my thing is, I don't know, is this, do, if you're a former oiler that was part of those cup teams, do you get hired by the Oilers, or is it like just a default thing where you should be assumed to be working for them? You just have an office. Yeah.

They go, hey, you haven't been to work in like 15 years. And they're like, what's that? See, that's where. Somewhere, Dr. Randy Gregg is still getting paychecks from the Oilers from like front office consulting. That's where Gretsky is different, though. He went in every day for the past five years, nine to five sat at his desk. Absolutely. Had a little time clock that he punched and ate lunch, bagged lunch.

Every day, Gretzky, K, they were like, Gretzky, you got to come into your office and he went in and stood behind the net and they're like, no, no, no, no, the other one. So it's a tough break for the Oilers because obviously whatever he was doing was working great. And we'll get to the Oilers, but yeah, he's going to be on TV and he's going to be on TV in the States. So he's not my problem. He's your problem. How do you guys feel about this? The thing that I liked about it was everybody, the initial wave of reaction, was, isn't he like kind of boring by design? Like, isn't that his whole deal?

And then the second wave of reaction was, you don't understand. This guy really likes hockey. And it's like, no, I did understand that. I don't think that is what makes him like a good guy to be on TV. I thought he hated it. I thought he was... It's fucking done with it. The biggest trick Wayne Gretzky ever pulled was convincing people for the last 45 years

that he actually hates hockey. Did you see the press release about it? Because I actually just read all of it. They said he's going to be there for key moments during the regular season, which leads me to believe that it's also kind of another part-time job until the playoffs start. So I don't think it's going to be, I mean, based on that, it's tough to imagine it being, you know, he's there every, whatever, every Tuesday night doing the full Chuck and Kenny kind of bit, which also.

also frankly sounds about right. Yeah, I mean, I think what's happening here pretty clearly is TNT has got the contract. They know that the vast majority of the American sports watching public doesn't follow the NHL with any regularity and probably knows a small handful of names of hockey players, and one of those names is Wayne Gretzky. so they want that when you turn on the TV, you're going to be okay, and coming up next, Wayne Gretzky, and you go, I know that guy,

and then you just hope that he can be good enough. But, I mean, I feel like we're going to get one or two Wayne Gretzky products. We're either going to get very boring Wayne Gretzky, who's also kind of wooden and not super, you know, we all have flashbacks to the Saturday Night Live hosting stint. Or there is a slight chance that we will get, like angry Olympics

Wayne Gretzky. You remember his heel turn in 2002 when he just flipped out on the officials and on Team USA and just and that we'll get that guy and he'll just go maybe not scorched earth

but he'll be this critical voice and and you know all the things that a lot of us kind of want or at least wouldn't mind seeing in terms of where the product set that would be cool I'm not getting my hopes up.

I hope he taps into whatever emotion he was feeling when he was holding up the Olympic torch during the opening ceremony since 2010. Just really. Every time they cut to it, he should be in the back of a pickup truck. Just like, where are you going, Wayne? I don't know. They didn't tell me. Like, half-browning. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that makes sense. Like, the justification here is, I mean, Sean, it's like you said, people are like, oh, wow, Wayne Gretsy's going to be on TV. And you hope that that's some sort of, you know, side door for people. people to start watching these broadcasts. I don't know that it's necessarily going to work because I think it's a, it's a gimmick, and that's fine, but there has to be some kind of payoff. And if he doesn't have the goods and if he's not interesting, then it's not like people are going to make it, you know, appointment watching, period.

Yeah. You look at other sports and they all have guys who were recognizable star names in the 70s, 80s, right. I mean, there's, you've got Terry Bradshaw and Howie Long are great on football. You've got Joe Morgan on baseball who's maybe not so great, but is, yeah, there was a website about it, I feel like. I think there was. Is it true? And then, you know, basketball, obviously, he got Barclay and Shaq and go on down the list. And I can get, if I'm a, if I'm a TV executive, I'm sitting there looking at the NHL going, why is it all back up goalies and fourth liners that that barely anyone has ever heard of.

Let's get some stars on there. And then somebody has to break it to that guy that none of the stars in the NHL are interesting at which point you go and just get the biggest star you can and I guess hope that he's going to be okay. Here's the interesting thing, right? It's like this is if TNT had Michael Jordan as the voice of their broadcast, right?

Like that's, you know, and Michael Jordan famously like, not really doing many big opinions in public because, you know, Republicans buy shoes too or whatever. You know, like, and so the idea that maybe like the best player of an era is going to be the big exciting guy versus Chuck and Shaq who are like, well, fuck it. I don't have anything to lose here, you know. and the unfortunate part of that is that the NHL did try like that level of a star, like the second tier star, but it was Jeremy Roanick. And he wasn't good on TV.

And Brett Hull before that, by the way. You remember he was on NBC for like 15 minutes and he was abysmal. He was terrible. I think the biggest issue is that it's going to require a full-on mindset change for American fans based on the last, you know, 17 years or however. long it's been because intermission programming is just not worth our time. Like we're, we're convinced, we're, um, so accustomed to just kind of flipping something else because it's like, who gives us shit? We have to watch Keith Jones and, and Roanick talk about God knows what. So it's going to take some kind of sea change to like change that behavior. And I, I, I, in a way,

it's easy to make fun of Gretzky because he's the most boring man on earth. But at the same time, like, you're trying to, you know, unlearn behavior in your, in your viewing audience. So it does make sense on some level, but it's just, it's also really, I don't know, man, it's tough, it's tough for me to see it working out. Well, the other thing to say, and obviously, like, this isn't a thing Sean has to worry about up in Canada, but like, there's not, like, it's not, it's a very small captive audience in hockey, right? Like, we're all sickos who are going to watch.

a midweek Minnesota Columbus game. Right. Because what else are we going to do? We're not going to watch something else. Whereas, you know... Read a book? No. Absolutely not.

I can't read. So, and like, you know, in Canada, obviously there's only seven teams that they ever put on TV up there. So, like, there's more... Less than that, according to some Canadians. Well, yeah, there's that. But it's... it'll be interesting to me to see how TNT decides to like

hype up some shitty midweek like St. Louis Nashville game. You know what I mean? Because it's not going to be well these are fun, exciting teams to watch. Yeah. And it's not going to be what it would have been 10 or 20 years ago which is come watch these guys beat the crap out of each other. Right. Because even on the rare occasions where that still happens, it's not something that you're going to

market and promote anymore. If Gretzky puts in the work, I can imagine him being worth listening to. Like, you either have to know your shit or you have to be entertaining. You can be both, but you certainly have to be one. Well, Gretzky knows his shit. Oh, I agree. Does, I mean, is he going to be able to speak authoritatively about the Nashville Predators in the Minnesota Wild on on a Tuesday night? Do we, do we know that? So let me put it this way. Last night when this kind of got like leaked. Tom Drantz, who obviously works for the athletic, but used to work for the Florida Panthers, he said that he had to, you know, escort Gretzky around the rink in sunrise one time. And Gretzky was like, yeah, so what's going on with these line combinations? Because I, you know, like, so he, like,

seems like he's just, he gets it on that level. That makes me think it has a better chance to work. I also didn't see that anecdote because I blocked Dran's on Twitter. I can't stand that. That's smart. Yeah. And look, here's the other thing. Like a lot of times with these guys, you want the expertise. I think all of us have probably at some point noted how little X's and O's there ever are in NHL broadcast for whatever reason. And so, you know, you want somebody you can be smart and talk about this stuff. But you also, when it's an ex player, you want like a storyteller too.

And again, Wayne Gretzky seems to default to boring, unoffensive. bland, but that guy's got a ton of stories. I mean, good Lord, the 80s Oilers, then go to the Hollywood Kings with all the celebrities, do a few months sentence with Mike Keenan, and then come to New York, and then you coach the coyotes for God knows what reason for five years. I have a couple. I have a couple guesses there. Yeah, exactly.

This guy, I mean, he could tell, he's probably got a million great stories. I hope he tapped. Oh, totally. Exactly. If he taps into it, like, it's going to work. I would love, like, hockey nerd Wayne Gretzky breaking stuff down and then also throwing in some stories from, you know, 1987. That'd be, that'd be awesome. I'm just skeptical that that's what we're going to get. Yeah, I think the hockey story telling Wayne Gretzky we all think of is, you know, we're going to be halfway through the season. We're like, oh, my God, another gorty-house story. All right. Okay, Wayne. Yari Curry did what? Wow. Yeah. And I mean, the worst case scenario is that it doesn't work for the same reason that a lot of us might think that his coaching didn't work, which is that in addition to maybe not even being a job he actually wants to do, it can be really tough for star players to comment, coach, whatever, players who can't do what they do.

You know, there's a frustration level of how did you not see that? Well, because nobody sees that except you. That's why you have more assist than anyone has points. Right. And if you take that down a million levels and you're expecting them to explain stuff to idiots like me, then, you know, something could be lost in translation there. I hope it works because I want something fun to watch during broadcast down here. But yeah. Well, so, but that's the thing, right?

is like we don't know what the TN, like, I think Greg has said before, like, the NBC broadcast is boring because that's the style they're going for. They're going for like bland. Totally. And obviously with like inside the NBA, they're not going for that at all. They're going for the opposite. But their, their, their, their first hockey hire is bland. So what it, like, I guess, I guess the point is you need to see the whole team before. Like, I don't want to get out in front of it and go like, well, this is going to suck. But also, they're like, oh for one on names where hockey fans are like, hell yeah, let's go. Yep.

Yeah, no, fair enough. And Gretzky has got a ways to go to be the Stephen A. Smith, which who weighs, who weighs in on the Oilers this week. Did you guys see that? You probably couldn't avoid it because it got tweeted like a hundred times. I love it. Yeah, he had Connor McDavid thoughts. I, you know, I honestly feel like with something like this, if you just showed me a script and you're like, somebody went on TV and said this, my eyes would roll so far into the back of my head, but he can pull it off. He's like maybe the only guy who can really do that and have it work. Would you? I have a friend who works in media down here, and he works for a big spot.

It's not ESPN. He texted me yesterday and said that that was the first time he'd ever heard of Leon Drysidal, was when Stephen Hay said his name. And acted like he, of course, knew who he was, which probably isn't bad marketing. Right? Like, again, this guy is a sports dork for the most part, and he was, like, like, oh, yeah, I'm not sure I knew who that guy was. Leon Dreisdell. And he knows because Stephen A. said his name yesterday.

Right. And the guy who is the reigning MVP. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If people didn't see it, it was, I mean, it was probably pretty much what you imagine, but he mentioned the others having McDavid, Endersightal, and very, kind of briefly explained who they were and then pretty much went in on them for going out in the first ground. Yeah, not super insightful, but again, like, there is something to, well, just the cool factor, this guy saying, like, of course we all know who Connor McDavid and Leandro Sidel are and you're sitting there as a sports fan going, I don't, but maybe I should. Because if he does, then maybe I should

do. So I don't, I don't watch ESPN during the day. Like, I don't have it on his background noise or anything, but I've had multiple people say to me, like, wow, they're really, they're really talking about hockey on them in the midday ESPN. programming and that's and it's getting it's shoehorned in obviously and it's you know half goofy stuff like you know like stephen a ripping the oilers but i think it's an interesting kind of window into you know even now before the deal starts they're trying they're trying to pump it up man so i i don't i don't see anything wrong with that i think that's i think only good things can come from that because it's really you know stephen a he he knows he knows the NBA to a pretty

serious extent, but he's gotten busted before, not, like, gotten stuff completely wrong about NFL teams and MLB stuff and whatever. I mean, he's, he's kind of a dilettante by nature. And a lot of... He said the Dallas Mavericks were a professional hockey team, so that's, he got in trouble for that one. Well, like, he, I remember last year, like, the tight end for the San Diego Chargers, like, blew out his knee or whatever it was, like, in the first, in the first two weeks, and he's like midway through the season talking about how this guy's going to be a matchup issue for whatever team they were playing. Like, he's gotten nailed before.

Got it. So he, yeah, I don't watch ESPN at all because they don't, they don't talk about hockey. Hockey is really the only sport I watch seriously. So, yeah, like, I have the opposite problem, but, you know, obviously, like, what I liked about the Stephen A video was he was like, look, I don't know shit about Hockey. Yes. We all know that. That's fine.

Like, it's good to not pretend. You know, like, oh, me with my big file of hockey information, and he just, like, drops a stack of notebooks on a desk. He did that in his first video. Like, when they announced the deal, he was like, here's the five things I know about hockey, and three of them were just complete. He was just doing bits. So I'm on board with that.

Like, he's not, he's not being a phony about it. He's not being a phony, but he's also, in the limited stuff I've seen at least, he's saying look here's what I know here's what I don't know but he's kind of tiptoeing up to but not crossing that line that happened so often

which is wouldn't it be ridiculous if I even did know anything like that stupid SNL sketch that everybody loves so much like oh they talked about hockey yeah they the whole premise of that sketch was wouldn't it be hilarious if a cool person

had to actually pretend that they knew anything about this stupid sport nobody likes and we were all like that's awesome you said our name. That's so cool. And I really hope with the various ESPN guys and, you know, Stephen A being one of them, that they don't go down that road. And there have been a couple times where it sort of felt like he was getting close to that, but then not. And definitely with his thing this week, he wasn't, he wasn't playing that card. So I, you know, I thought it was cool.

What do we think in general of the Edmonton Oilers? Well, I think it was a negative. of myself. They definitely shouldn't have done that. Yeah. The thing that I liked about the Stephen A thing to put a bow on that is that he did the hockey media guy thing and he was like, and it's the star's fault that they stink.

Yeah. You know what I mean? He's like, he's the two best players. Real quick. Yeah. Here's like two of the four best players in the world. They have no other NHLs Allent on their team. It's their fault.

The team got swept. Like that, actually is such a perfect summation of the hockey media. Like, look, no, I don't think anybody, I think everybody is surprised they got swept, but obviously, but I don't think anybody's going, this is a complete shocker that the Edmonton Oilers lost in the first round again. Their goalie was Mike Smith. Their number one defenseman missed the entire season. They, they had to put dry saddle on. the McDavid line to get any kind of offensive looks going.

And that means they had like two other NHL players in their forward group off that line. Josh Archibald was the one that I just, I can't believe he played the amount that he did for them over the course of the regular season because he couldn't even crack the lineup with the penguins. He's like five, you know, five nine or something. Yeah. And like you look at their roster and you go, okay. Well, like, Connor McDavid made Josh Archibald look like a confident NHL player, right? But last year he did that with Zach Cassian. Zach Cassian got a big fat fucking contract out of it.

And it's like, this is the problem. That would drive me crazy if I'm Connor McDavid because we all know he took way less money than he could have when he signed that eight-year deal. I'm not going to say it's a bad deal because he can have whatever priorities he wants, but he signed it. And the whole idea with that was, oh, okay, but he's leaving money on the table that they can then use to surround him with talent. And instead, they put plugs on his line. He banks goals off of those guys because he's Connor McDavid. And then they give his money to those guys and are like, here's Zach Addy. You're a $3 million player now.

And he's sitting there going like, well, we don't know. We don't know what he's, but if I was him, I would be sitting there going. either spend the money I gave you on good players or give me cheap guys and to put a play on my line and spend it somewhere else. But don't give me cheap guys and then turn them into expensive guys because I'm so good that I turn them into good players. Yeah, it's the 2012 Pittsburgh Penguins problem where they were like everybody who plays with Malkin and Crosby deserve $5 million. Yep. That's it. That's all it is.

And again, like who couldn't have foreseen a situation where Mike Smith, is like slightly less than passable in the playoffs. And it costs them, now granted, the other thing we have to say is, Connor McDavid, or, sorry, Connor Hellebuck stood on his fucking head for four straight games. This was, I've seen it referred to as maybe the closest sweep in NHL history. I mean, you should look at any of the numbers. Edmonton was either a slightly better team or at least.

even with the Jets. Three of the games go into overtime. The first game was a one goal game until the empty netters. This is, of any sweep, you can imagine, this was about as close as they can come,

but I don't know if that ultimately is really saying all that much when you lose 40. They have two fucking MVPs and they just got swept by the Winnipeg Jets. Who are terrible? Aren't good? They're so bad.

I don't know if it's one of those things where we're so accustomed to it and we're generally accustomed to the oilers being bad, and it's like we, I don't, I feel like people aren't angry enough about this. Because I talked, and I talked to us yesterday, too, we're getting cheated out of playoff fronts by these guys. Without, without trying to, you know, make it into some moral issue or whatever, these guys are 25 years old or close to it now.

And we just missed out on another. one. For what? For what reason? I still can't get over the Ken Hall and Trade deadline comments. That boggles my fucking mind where he's like there's some years where you don't go all in. As if he, A, as if he just took the job when he's been on it for three years, crazy. Like, he's not responsible for the, for the rest of the makeup of this roster. Like, it was somebody else. Just really, really crazy shit. And, um, I hope it stops. I don't really want to continue doing this every year.

I'm sure Connor McDavid doesn't either. Yeah, that's the Ken Holland comments if people didn't hear them. It was at the trade deadline after the Oilers did basically nothing when they got like Dimitri Kulikov for a late pick. And Ken Holland said, I don't think you can be all in every year. I think you pick and choose. Which on one level, yes, absolutely. I mean, you can't be trading your first round pick every year.

we all understand that. But man, I mean, you have Leon Dressidal, who was the MVP last year, who's having almost as good a season this year. You've got Connor McDavid having the best season any forward his head since Merrill Lemieux. You have Mike Smith, a 38-year-old goalie who has not been good for a few years, having a miracle rebound season where he's actually playing well. and you're doing this all in a division that is very winnable and has a very clear path out of it. You can't go all in every year, but this year has been a pretty good one.

He's talking like he's David Poyle at the deadline who had a shit team that he would just been buying time for anyways, and he went out and got Good Branson, and Poyle was like, yeah, like, whatever, like, what are you going to do? He's treating his team the same way as if it's like a fringe playoff contender without any, without any meaningful bits. And it's like the process should start. Go get somebody. Try. And look, I mean,

Connor McDavid, Endricidal, but especially, like, McDavid is going to be an MVP-level player in this league for at least 10 more years. But this is his prime right now. And you've just wasted

this incredible gift that you got from the lottery god, and so far you haven't put anything around. Like we get that it's difficult. We get that this is the NHL. One guy can only do so much. You've got to fill all these spots. But it really is amazing to me five, six years later, how little the Oilers had been able to put in place around this guy.

Like, Dressido was already there. Ryan Nugent Hopkins was already there. Who have they added up front since Connor McDavid, where you would say, yeah, I mean, okay, that's a good player that they put in. Yamamoto, I think that's about it, right? That's it. That's fucking incredible.

But here's the amazing, the Ken Holland thing from earlier this year, the amazing part is, dude, we saw all the work you did with the fucking Detroit Redwood. Yes. You were out there trading first round picks for mediocre veterans every single year trying to just scrape into the playoffs after Nicklin's retired. David Legwand, the corpse of Daniel Alfredson, it's just a wild,

a wild 180 from Holland, and now he's, and now he is all about discretion. Whenever he has, whenever he has Connor McDavid having a Lumus season? If he was 33, if he was 33, he'd be like, we gotta go out and get the PA-P hair-dos of the world. We owe this. to Connor McDavid.

Also, they lost the Milan-Lucci's trade, by the way. I would like to... Incredible. Remarkable, remarkable work. Yeah. The thing I can't get is it feels like they're throwing all this money at deft guys. And I think that every NHL team approached free agency

should be sit out the first few days and then wait till the bargains. start to bubble up to the surface. But the Emington, can you imagine if you're an NHL player and there's going to be some, certainly in a flat cap scenario, there's going to be players that don't get the sort of deals that they're looking for. Wait it out a little bit and then

call those guys and be like, hey, I know you didn't get the traction you were looking for. Do you want to come to Edmonton for one year and play next to Connor McDavid and put up the best numbers you have ever put up in your life and then try again in free agency? Yeah, I think I do. And you would think there

a lineup with those guys. Like, you look at the Leifes, who are the team up here in Canada, the Oilers always get compared to because they both won lotteries and, you know, the Leaps are, have got a ton of depth. And yeah, some of that is because they just wait and they get Jason Spetsa, Joe Thornton, all these guys, Wayne Simmon Tate, do you guys want to come home to Toronto and play for, on cheap contracts? Yeah, we do, actually. And off they go. It's not quite the same in Edmonton, but you would think, hey, come play with Connor

McDavid would be a really, really strong selling point. point. And yet so far it doesn't really happen. And it's not I don't even think it's for lack of trying. It's because they don't have any cap space by the end of the summer because they've given it all to plugs. Well, there's that and there's also the guys they do target for that kind of thing

are fucking Milan Luchy, right? You're the prize-free agent. Could you please to us a huge favor of and look, that's Peter Chiarrelli being Peter Chiarrelli. I get all that. That's, you know, You know, that's fine.

But at some point, you're just going to say, you know, maybe these, like, old hockey guys shouldn't be making these decisions anymore because they don't fucking get it. They don't, they don't understand. And again, like, to go back to the thing about blaming stars, people are like, well, he needs to have the Steve Eiserman realization. And it's like, first of all, obviously that's bullshit, right? But second of all, like, the thing is that when Steve Iserman had that realization, or whatever you want to say, I mean, he was 29 years old, something like that. But what the Red Wings did was they were like, what if we around the same time as Steve Iserman turned 28, what if we went out and acquired nine future Hall of Famers?

Yeah, it's a lot easier. It's a lot easier for Steve Isamen to have that realization whenever he's playing with, you know. The Russian five, right. Exactly. Then fucking Josh Archibald. Yeah. Like that's the thing. I saw that saying that Ken Holland has to have the Steve Eisenman conversation with Connor McDavid. I think Connor McDavid has to have the Steve Eisenman conversation with Ken Hollen and go, where's my Brendan Shanahan?

Yeah. Where's that happening? I've got my Sergei Fedorov and Dr. Okay, where's Lidstrom? Don't see that anywhere. Where's Chelyos? Where's, you know, where's Larry Murphy, where, you know, that they went and got for for next to nothing because they identified an opportunity.

That, I think, is the conversation to have. And I got to say, like, I like the Ken Holland hiring when Eminton did it. There is a part of me now that wonders if it wasn't on some level of mistake to go out and get a guy who already had a bunch of cup rings because it feels like the sense of urgency isn't there. Well, it's that. And it's, again, like, why are the Red Wings so fucking bad now? It's because of all the contracts, Ken Holland signed over the last decade, right?

Like, he's like, oh, I got, I got a lock in fucking Danny DeKaiser and, and fucking Justin Abdelcator. Like, those are the guys Ken Holland thinks is good. And so, like, I'm not surprised that he went out and tried to get Milan Luchich and wanted to lock up Zach Cassian. And, like, we couldn't possibly afford to lose a Zach fucking Cassian. Like, it... Can you imagine... Of course he's that guy. Can you imagine Ken Holland having the Steve Eiserman conversation with Steve Eisenman

after the equivalent of fucking 105 points in 56 games. Like that's not when the Steve Eiserman conversation happened. He was well down the road and certainly not putting up, you know, a point one point eight points a game or whatever the hell the math works out to. And we should also point out the other piece of this is that Connor McDavid was not a very good defensive player last year. But this year, competent. Competent. Maybe even a little bit better than that.

I mean, it wasn't, you know, he's not Steve Eisenman suddenly being a Selky finalist, but he was, his defense was not the issue this year. And the fact that he improved his defense that much while also going completely insane on the offensive side, yeah, the idea that any of this is, there's no, here's why the oilers lost take that should involve Connor McDavid. its name in any context other than not enough guys to play with. Yeah. So, all right, we danced on the Oilers Grave.

Let's do the same for a couple of the teams who've gone out since we last spoke. Capitals and the Blues. I'll put them both out. What do we think of the path forward for either of these teams? I think if you're the blues, you can kind of talk yourself into, this was a fucked-up season, right? Like, I don't, I don't love their roster, but, you know, it's pretty, with obviously with the exception of not having their previous captain on the roster anymore, it's a situation where you can kind of look at it and say, this is pretty much the same team

that we went to a cup final and won pretty easily with. And granted, some of that was a white-hot goaltender who hasn't been that since, right? But also, you know, like, they were a very solid team when they won the cup, regardless of how hot Bennington got at the right time. Like, you know, all their underlying numbers were very good. And this year, a million COVID issues, a million injuries. I think you just kind of go, yeah, we can improve in the offseason. Like, we have that kind of flexibility. let's just kind of take another kick at this can in a normal season and see what happens. You can't do that if you're the Capitals, though.

The Capitals have a million questions. Everybody on the team's 31 years old. And Alexander Ovechkin's contract is done. Yeah. He is, you never see him listed as like in free agency previews. We all assume he's not going anywhere. Although we all said the same thing about Sedano Chair a year ago. but yeah I mean what do you do with that if you're like if ovechkin says yeah I want another eight years or something like that is there any scenario here where we're at all concerned that they either can't keep him or that it turns into a very regrettable situation I wonder what the odds in that are like is there some sort of weird godfather offer that comes to him on the first day of free agency and he just is sort of like yeah

I'll take four years from... I think what helps the caps there is that so few contending teams are going to have caps-based that there might not be anybody out there who's like an easy fit in terms of like, yeah, fine, you want four years at, you know, $9 million or whatever it's going to end up being. So, I mean, I still...

I expect him to end up back there, but, man, you look at their salary structure and it's just not good, man. A lot of money. It's a lot of money. It's, you know, they just added the Manta contract, which is, you know, that's not Peanuts. That's 5.7 for him.

He's 26, by the way. I feel like people, people don't kind of realize that. Yeah, and he was one of the youngest players on their playoff roster at 26 years old. And, you know, I said it, like, when the playoffs started and people got mad at me. Like, I thought that was a bad matchup for them from day one because they were old. slow and they look pretty banged up a lot of the time. Really, really, really top-heavy. Their bottom six is junk.

And the other thing to say, though, is that, like, oh, well, you would go, okay, well, I mean, some of it was COVID stuff and where are you going to do injuries? It's like, well, when everybody on your team's old, injuries are more of a problem. Like, that's how this works, right? So, you know, I just thought, well, it's like, well, the Bruins can play fucking track meet hockey. against these guys and it'll be tough for them

whereas, you know, like the Bruins are a dominant team and I've said it before, but like the Capitals were just a dangerous team. If you gave them opportunities to put the puck in the net, they were going to do it, but the Bruins don't do that. Like, that's not what the Bruins brand of hockey is. And like, I, you know, it's tough. So I guess the issue is, right, like, they're not going to be in the same division as the Bruins next season.

Yeah, but they're still going to have CEMS-Sov and, Vanichick and whatever. Like, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's no answer there. That division is still good. Well, right. So, right. So, right. So, right.

So, if you swap out the Bruins for Carolina, um, at least you could say with Carolina, it's like, well, maybe the gold hending is. Like, I don't know what in Delcovich is. You know what I mean? Right. So, like, I, I think there, I think they're still going to be pretty good, but like, they need an exit strategy for this. I'm interested.

I'm interested to see what happened with Kuznetsov, man. I don't think he's... Yeah, I think he's got to be done, right? You got to assume. Yeah. You would think, but that's, I mean, the whole thing with the Capitals is you look down that roster, and other than the Ovechkin, there's nobody coming off the books. Not at all.

They're locked in. Right. The only other guys coming off the books are Sedano-Cera, Craig Anderson, and Paul Ladew, who apparently is a human being that plays in the NHL. And then Lunkwist, which was obviously LTIR all year and who knows. But other than that, like it's not like a lot, there's a lot of teams you go, oh, they're capped out, but then you go, well, you know what, this guy goes, this guy goes, okay, they maybe got some room.

There really isn't any. And that's what brings it back to Kuznetsov, because he's at $7.8 million, four more years after this one. He's 29, so he's not old, but he's not. young anymore. He's another one of those guys that I think people think is younger than he is. Oh, yeah. And all of this stuff behind the scenes, the COVID, the whatever else, it seems like there's not a lot of patience there. But what do you do? What's the market for a nearly $8 million player? That you're mad at. Yeah, that people know you want to move. Who's a good player, obviously,

but he's coming off at 29-point season. He hasn't been a point of game since 2018. Is this, like, are their teams lining up to get this guy and to give you significant assets for it? I don't, I don't think so. He'd be more, he'd be more of a dump than anything else at this point. With the way the, with the way the cap is shaking out across the league, there's not a team that wants to pay him $7.8 million. You'd be, you'd be retaining some of it and sending them to a, to a shit team. Yeah. I think, I think there are obviously teams that could use Top Six Center.

and he is that for all intents and purposes. Like, could Columbus use, againi Kuznetsov, you know, absent he's going to give everybody COVID or whatever? Like, yeah. I feel like he might fit in pretty well with that team. Yeah. But, yeah. So, like, there are teams that could use him, but, like, they're not going to be, like,

take our first round pick, take our top prize. suspect. Like, you would be doing the capitals of favor by taking him off your hand. You know, you move him and then, like, you know, let's say you retain 25%. So that's 2 million. So you just freed up a little under 6 million. Who are you going to get to play in your top 6 for that amount that makes your team better? Whenever. Josh Archibald. Yeah. Whenever your fundamental problem is that your top 6, despite being, you know, is in decline and still okay. and then having a bottom six that's just just a bunch of just a bunch of dudes.

Like you're not really addressing any, any, any real issue there. You're exacerbating other problems. Yeah, that's, they're in trouble. They've got a tough path. Let's look at the series that are still going on, at least as of, as we're recording this on the morning of whatever day it is right now. Islanders, penguins. Islanders are up three to, sweet playmaking. ability by Tristan Jari on the overtime winner.

Is that, I mean, did the penguins come back from that? This is your territory, Sean. Is there hope? I think, I mean, if you ignore the goaltender, I think there's hope. I think they've played pretty well at five-on-five throughout the course of the series. I mean, I think there's hope with that team. The overriding vibe from them is that they know that, or they, think or hope that the last game was just a crazy fluke because the goalie

because the goalie fucked it up for him right but um this is who trist and jari is coming into this series a lot of people are like wow he's really good at home and terrible on the road as if that were the explanation for his inconsistency was that oh yeah he's he's good in one place and not in the other the reason he's inconsistent is that he's inconsistent and He was like, you know, he's like, whatever. Randomly, he had a 925 at home this year, but he was sub-900 on the road, and that's because he's not very reliable and not very good. Right. And the other thing to say of like any time you're getting into home road splits, it's like, well, I don't know if you knew this, but they play like half of the games on the road.

Yeah. Right. So, like, if your goalie's going to suck shit for half the season, that's bad. That's not a situation you want to be in. And especially this year, whenever, for such a huge chunk of it, I mean, yeah, you know, you know, talk about last change and all that. But, like, the environments at home in a way were pretty identical because, you know, someone just started jack hammering outside, outside my apartment. I don't know if you guys can hear that. It's very distracting.

I can, yeah. So it's the penguins are getting to work. Yeah, or they're doing line work on the street outside. It could be either or. That's Chris Tanev running the jackhammer out there. Brandon Tanev, good God. Yeah, Chris Tanev is... Calgary Flames.

He signed with a Calgary, one of the many Vancouver Canucks who signed with the Calgary Flames this past summer. And it worked out great. Yeah, unbelievable. Yeah, the thing with the Penguins is they... They maybe aren't in the same spot they were in the pre- two cups era, but it's close, right? Like, they kind of have a lot of bums on the roster again. And, you know, Sidney Crosby and Evgeny Malkin, who is clearly playing hurt, can only do so much.

And, you know, it's tough because I think, on paper, they're better than the Islanders. But the Islanders' two best players are a number one center who can at least give you something to think about. and a goalie who is playing extremely well. So I don't know that there's a way around that, you know? Yeah. When it comes to the Penguins, I've been waiting for the San Jose Sharks style collapse for a few years now, and I keep being proven wrong.

So I'm not going to go too far down on that. And, I mean, they still win two games and win the series, but yeah, I'm shocked to see a Brian Burp team get let down by goal tanning in the playoffs. This is a stunning development. It is kind of a shame for them too because the Carter line has been really good. I mean, they have forward depth in a way that they have in the last couple years. I think the defensive group is fine. Like, that roster is better now, honestly, than it was over the last two years,

but the goal is letting them down. And it's because he's probably not that good. Yeah. And, but you know what? All that said, if he doesn't make that terrible turnover and overtime and the Penguins win that game, then we're having a completely different conversation. He's looked deeply uncomfortable for the entire series. And I've watched a whole lot of this dude. And he's, I mean, he's a grab bag, right?

Like, sometimes he looks great and sometimes he looks terrible. But there's been no point over the course of this series where even in the run of normal play, when he hasn't been allowing goals, just he's handcuffing himself. He's a mess. So, yeah, it's going to take, it's going to take a big change, whether it's, you know, whether they make it to a game seven or not,

I wouldn't, I wouldn't feel too great about their chances. Let's talk about another series where goaltending has been an issue for one of the teams. And it's been maybe my favorite series so far, which is Lightning Panthers. Florida stays in it. They have used three starting goaltenders. in one round by choice. Washington did too, but there were injuries there.

Is this the Spencer Knight era here? Is this just prolonging the inevitable? Did they screw this up from the beginning by going with the rotation they did? Yeah, I mean, I thought it was a strange decision to play Popovsky at all, honestly. But like, I know, Drieger had been hurt off and on down the stretch.

But and you go, well, look, there's a, this a, the, our only other option is a, is a kid that no matter what his pedigree is, he's got like four NHL games under his belt. So like, I kind of get that they were in a, in a tough spot with that, but it's like, yeah, they, they should have gone to night after game two, maybe. because it, you know, Vrovsky seems like he's got the worst contract in the league now. I can't believe they went back to him. I thought once they, I thought once they pulled him, that that was, I thought that was going to be it. So for them to go back to the well with him was a wild thing to see.

I mean, I think the thinking there is, especially if you're Joel Cuenville, you're looking at the three goalies you've got and you're going, okay, let's map out all the scenarios where we win the Stanley Cup or at least go very deep. How many of those don't involve Sergey Bobrovsky being the guy who takes over the net? Like are we really going to ride Spencer Knight to deep into a playoff run? Are we really going to run a guy who's been a minor leaguer his whole life up until this year? Or do we have to assume that the two-time Vezant guy that we threw all this, money yet, rediscovers his game. And maybe that's why you sit there and go look at,

to win the series, yeah, maybe we've got a better chance with some of the other guys. But if we want to actually turn this into something bigger, we got to hope it's, it's Brobowski or bust. I don't know. That's the best logic I can come up with. I'm not sure any of it matters because, man, the Tampa Bay Lightning look really, really good. And they, are they now, I don't No, no, Sean. You guys are, I think, keeping the power rankings going during the playoffs. Is Tampa moving close to that number one spot at this point? It's tough to pick them over the abs under any circumstance. But we've, like, been high on the lightning, obviously, for the duration of it.

We take shit all the time. That's interesting. Well, it's not interesting, but what is interesting is the amount of shit we take in the comments about it. People are like, oh, they're this and they're that. And it's like, no, they're still the Tampa Bay Lightning, and they still are getting, they still. played the entire season without Nikita Kutrov, be realistic about this. They're, like, their starting lineup most nights is like, oh, this is a very plausible all-star game starting lineup.

Like, that's how good the Tampa Bay Lightning's roster is. And so, yeah, like, I get that, I get that maybe they underperformed in terms of, well, they didn't blow everybody out of the water, you know, in the regular season. But to your point, they didn't have a recent MVP winner. They're apparently Norris-style defensemen, who didn't have a Norris-style year. I was playing hurt for a good chunk of the season. Stamco's missed a bunch of time, blah, blah, blah.

But you can go down the list. And it's like, should they have this much problem putting away a okay Florida Panthers roster? Probably not, but also, like, at the end of the day It's hockey Yeah they brought back the guts of a team That won a Stanley Cup last year Like I don't

It's not it's not rocket science And in all the issues that they had Yeah I don't know how you can't have them At the very tippy top of You know whatever list of Of contenders you have going Yeah we kind of talked about it A little bit last week

But the one thing I was concerned about Was yeah Kuturov's gonna come back But that doesn't mean he's gonna be Kuturov And yep If he was like so it does be that actually that's actually fun. That's me. The winner of that series

is going to get the winner of Carolina Nashville, which we, I mean, if you had asked me a week ago, I would have said we'd be talking about that series in the past tense and the hurricanes would already move on. But the predators are giving them a fight. Last night Carolina wins in overtime,

takes a 3-2 series lead. Is that it? Or are we expecting another twist or turn? I mean, you see Saras. is just playing out of his mind. That's what it boils down to. Like, you know, they took a goal off the board for Carolina and regulation that should have been a goal. You know, like, I don't want to get into like, oh, here's why, you know, whatever.

I just think it should have been a goal. I looked fine to me. And, you know, if it doesn't go to overtime, I think we're talking maybe a little more emphatically about, well, they're going to wrap it up ASAP now. But still, like, U.S.S. Soros is the one making this series close. Let's be honest. Yeah, which is what we all said going in head to happen, and it's kind of happening. And, yeah, thank goodness that disputed gold didn't end up making the difference on Windsor losses,

because I'm not sure I can do another two days of the nobody understands goaltending interference schtick. so I'm glad in that sense of Carolina won. Sean, what are you seeing in this series? And do you have any hope to offer to the many Predators fans who listen to this podcast? Trying to battle through this Jack Hammer. It is not easy at all. It's the playoffs, man. You've got to fight through.

I know, dude. This is exactly what we've thought a series win for the Predators or a competitive series for the Predators would look like, right? It was Saros going crazy and kind of standing on his head. I mean, you look at the numbers from last night. That's another really solid game by the canes across the board. And it was it was the goalie, right? So you can, if you're Carolina, you can blame it on that. And if you're Nashville, you can say like, yeah, this is, this is going to continue.

Yep. I can't wait until this goes up. People are going to be so mad at us. People feel the need to tweet us. And they're like, did you know? that there was no no we had no idea Sean was not aware that Sean what you should do is go out there and be like can you guys keep it down I am trying to podcast it here stop please yeah

uh all right well we'll keep it going um Vegas Minnesota another one where uh maybe look like it was going to be over quick and the Minnesota fights back uh is it is it are the wild going to screw us out of the Golden Knights, Avalanche, second round Stanley Cup final that we've all been waiting for. No. I don't think so. Okay. That's probably a boat right.

The interesting thing is, I saw somebody posted the stat that basically during the regular season, the three best goalies in the league were Hellebuck, Vasilevsky and Mark Andre Fleury. And during the playoffs, exact same three guys. Yeah. Mark Andre Fleury looks really, really good. to the point where give them non-amazing goal-tending and this series kind of maybe looks a different. I feel bad in a sense for wild fans

who have just been waiting so long to have a team that's interesting and it just seems like they ran into this powerhouse. But I think Vegas wins the series. I think the question at this point might be how much can the wild take out of them before they get to a very well-rested Colorado Avalanche team? in round two. Yeah, I think that's, I mean, like, the thing was Minnesota seemed to have Vegas's number

this year to an extent that nobody else did. And, you know, I think that you were like, well, I mean, look, are they as good as Vegas on paper? No, obviously not. But, you know, maybe it's a matchups thing. Maybe it's this or that. But at the end of the day, I think some of it is, well, look, Minnesota has Camtale it and that.

You know what I mean? Like, the, he's been good. He's been pretty good, but like. Most of it, especially early on. Yeah, but like Flore's just having like an otherworldly seat. Like, I think he should win the Vesna this year, and he's continued that into the playoffs because why, you know, why wouldn't he? And yeah, I, that's kind of where I'm at with it. It's like, if the difference in this series was going to come down to goaltending, and I think that was a reasonable assumption going in,

Then this was Vegas' series to lose. And that's what looks like it's going to happen. There's one more series. I'm trying to remember which one it is. Oh, right. The Toronto Maple Leafs are up three to one on the Montreal Canadians. Convince me that I should still be worried as a Leafs fan, Ryan. They're the Leafs, I think.

Right. Yep, that did it. That did it. I'm right back there. Yeah. And I mean, like, for real, you know, it's funny. I've seen more recently that a lot of people are kind of saying, you know, maybe I do think Carrie Price is just clutch or whatever, because he's playing very well.

He didn't play great last night, I guess you would say. But, you know, first few games, it's like, oh, Carrie Price is a lot. locked in. That's it. You know? But otherwise, yeah, Montreal is kind of hanging on by their fingernails, it feels like, and just hoping to not get blown out. And that was kind of what we always expected, right? Just in terms of, they don't have a particularly good roster. Their coach doesn't really seem to have any clue what he's doing. So, you know, at the end of the day, what are you really going to say about the Canadians? Like, there's only so many. guys, they can keep healthy scratch for no reason, insert into the lineup and get a good game

out of. Yeah, I think from a Leafs fan perspective, they're playing well. Series is not over. You will not trick me into doing any victory laps until they've closed it out. But this is about how I think most neutral fans might have expected the series to go. and Montreal just doesn't have the firepower up front. So they really needed a carry price series, and they've been getting it to some extent,

and it still hasn't been enough. And the thing that, not that you need things to worry about if you're Montreal, but one more thing to worry about is they're down 3-1 in a series where Austin Matthews and Mitch Marner have not been very good in this series. It's not that they've played poorly, but they haven't been productive. They had a stretch in,

in one of the games where they looked pretty dominant. But other than that, they've been real quiet. I mean, you're getting beat by Alex Kerfoot and Galchenguk here. That's a bad sign. So it'll be interesting to see where Montreal goes if they do lose this series. We can cover that next week or next week we can talk about another epic Maple Leafs collapse and have fun with that. Sean, I am, by the way, going to try to trick you into doing a victory lap. No.

You said, I can't. I'm going to try. You can try. It won't. It won't work. I'm going to try. But, yeah, the other piece of this is, and again, you never want to look too far ahead. But I do feel like the John Tavares injury does put a real dent in the Leaf's hopes of winning a Stanley Cup.

I don't think it's enough to matter necessarily against Montreal, maybe not even against Winnipeg if they get there, but when you're talking about a Vegas or Colorado or Tampa situation, that's a big loss. And we don't know for sure that he won't be able to return in the playoffs, but I think that's the assumption for everyone. But that's down the road. For now, I mean, geez, we'd leave fans.

We've been waiting 17 years to win a series. Almost there, not quite there yet, but obviously looking good. Looking real good. Sean, do you want to do maybe a little victory lap about how good it's looking? Yeah, well, it can't hurt, right? Oh, he did it. You got it. Got them. Swish. Well, I mean, this is how the series, in a lot of ways, was supposed to go for the Canadians if they wanted to win it, right? You have Carrie Price playing out of his mind, and you have Matthews and Marner, you know, not, not, not,

producing in that kind of way. So yeah, I feel like the victory lap is warranted. This is over. You should be very excited about playing the Winnipeg Jets. It's got to be frustrating if you're Montreal and you've been waiting. I mean, the whole Bergen-era has been about getting that top-line talent and they haven't been able to. And they've tried trades and Tfarist didn't talk to them and they had the offer sheet. And then you come into this series.

And first of all, your coach doesn't play some of your, you know, most dynamic. offensive players, especially Cole Coughfield. Maybe you can explain that by saying, you know, line chain, he didn't want to be put him in a situation where he maybe got bad matchups, but that's tough. But what's got to be really tough is you go into this series and you're looking at the Leaves going, well, Matthews, Marner, if he's got, you're getting your butt kicked by Jason Spencer. And there's got to be a point where you're like, well, how come we don't have a guy like that?

I don't know. How come we don't have a 39-year-old? Damn. Exactly. So it's, yeah, you know, we can all, it's game, game five is going to go Thursday. It's in Toronto. Everybody in the world is going to, is going to be waiting for it to get closed out. If Carrie Price stands on his head and now suddenly it's Gabe 6 in Montreal,

and there's going to be fans in the building, you win that one, and now all the pressure in the world's on Toronto, we can see how this could play out in a way that doesn't work for the least, but I'm also not going to pretend that they're not in very good shape. That's why it's time for a victory lap. And that brings us A segment we like to call Sean takes a victory.

You know who's not looking good according to most people is the officiating in the NHL. Wow, who could have guessed that? I know, right? Jesus Christ, every year with this. But yeah, a lot of people are not happy. I know.

Yeah. Look, here's my theory and tell me if I'm really off base here. I think a lot of the criticism is valid. I agree with a lot of it. I don't agree with the theory that NHL officiating gets significantly worse in the playoffs. I think NHL fans and media pay significantly more attention during the playoffs. And for that reason, it seems worse. but I'm not convinced that the standards really change all that much,

or even the way they're applied, really change all that much. It's just that every game is so crucial that when it's Calgary beating Vancouver halfway through the season, it's on a weird call. You're like, who even cares? But in the playoffs, there's so much attention that even a call that ends up not affecting the game, we still get an hour to debate it on Twitter. I mean, it's, is, am I on to something there, or does NHO officiating actually get worse in the playoffs?

I will say maybe not in the first period or two, but in the third period, it's just like, well, you could just like throw your stick at somebody. They're not going to fucking call it. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's more glaring examples. Right? Like McDavid, not drawing a penalty in that entire series is bananas.

That was bad. And whatever. But like, Japers Rink actually did a real, quick scatter plot of penalties drawn versus points per 60 in the regular season. And it's just, it's incomprehensible. So it's random. There's no pattern whatsoever. Right.

So there are these attention grabbing, really high profile examples of the officiating being shit, but I think that's generally true across the board. What's interesting about that graph, and there was an another where, like, on Twitter, Jeffler went through the top 20 or whatever it was scorers and showed where they ranked in terms of penalties drawn. And again, nobody ranks all that high and some guys are towards the bottom of the league, which seems crazy that if you're the best player and you've got the puck, you should be drawing penalties.

There'd be a lot of fans who would look at that and say, that's the system working the way it should work. Same set of rules for everybody. We don't want this to be the NBA where you can't even touch a star player. Right, right, but that ignores the fact that, I mean, yeah, there's a star system in a way in the NBA that there, that does exist in the NHL, but drawing penalties and drawing fouls is a legitimate skill. So if you look at the, and if you look at the top free throw shooters in the NBA, just from one to ten, it's Embed, Janice, Zion, Trey Young, Jimmy Butler, Bradley Beale. Like, like, it's, it's, it's glaring because part of being a dangerous offensive. of player in both sports means that you put yourself in a position to draw fouls.

So yeah, it is. It's craziness. It's glaring. Like, I'm not about to say that it's equally bad, you know, between the regular season and the playoffs. But, you know, it just goes from bad to worse. Yeah. It's been interesting to see when the Tim Peel situation happened, it feels like everybody was on the same page. stop managing the game

stop giving the same number of power plays to both teams no matter what just call the rulebook and if one team commits a lot of penalties and the other one doesn't then one team should get a lot of power plays and the other one shouldn't and we all agreed on that right up until the playoffs started and now everybody's looking at a goal

but that team got more power plays than us this isn't fair and I get where it comes from because there are it's this it's this double-sided coin where it's like this is how it should be, but also this is how you usually call it. So I don't want you to call it the way you usually call it, but for now, please call it the way you usually call it. And it, and it, and it, and it, and it, and, and, and, and,

there's, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, there's, there have been a couple of goaly interference calls, people didn't like, we haven't had, like, the real big, like, there hasn't been like the Joe Pavelski call or, you know, something like that where you're like, that was just a crazy missed call. This is just kind of run-of-the-mill stuff. But it's, I mean, look, some of this is being a fan. You're always going to think your team doesn't do anything and the other team's getting away with so much. But the level, like in the Toronto Montreal series, there's, Montreal fans are furious because there was a game where they got six penalties and the Leafs got one in terms of power plays. But of the six penalties, one of the three of the six penalties, one of the,

of them was a guy broke his stick over another guy's back on a cross check. One of them was a Shea Weber cross check that he got supplemental discipline for. And one of them was a goalie review that they challenged and lost. So they called the penalty on themselves. It's not up to the referees to say, well, even though they committed those obvious penalties, we still have to even it up. But if you're a Montreal fan, you go, yeah, but they usually do. So they should do it here too.

I don't know. Can you even fix this? Or is this should, do we just resign ourselves to this is going to, we're going to have the same conversation every postseason? You can't fix it midstream, that's for sure. You have to have an actual dedication to fixing it on kind of a cellular level that the NHL clearly doesn't have. So we're just, yeah, we're going to end up having this conversation every single year. Yeah, and I mean, you know, there is a situation where at the beginning of not every season, but some seasons, they're like, oh, we have a new rule that we emphasize.

And you can't slash a guy's stick, like even on a stick lift. You can't do it. And then they do it every game 15 times. And there's, you know, 45 powerplays per night and all that kind of stuff. You lose their stomach for it. We hate it. We would hate it. Well, no, yeah.

And people complain about it because it feels like, well, this is just like an arbitrary thing. Yeah, because you're calling one thing out of, out of. Because you're calling one thing, adnostic. Absolutely. And it's certainly also the case where, like, the NFL, where they always go, well, you could call holding on every play, and that would suck. And so you only call the egregious holds. And it's like, I guess that's true. But I don't know.

There has to be a way to strike a balance between Connor McDavid. Like, this is the thing I wrote about in, like, 2018 of, like, Connor McDavid. I think it was I think it was Connor McDavid and Cody MacLeod because it was Cody McLeod drew more penalties per hour than anybody in the league

and part of that was like fighting majors like you technically draw a fighting major as far as the NHL is concerned and so like but even if you took fighting majors out he drew 50% more penalties per 60 minutes

of ice time that Connor McDavid David did. And it's like, yeah, like very clearly, it's not allowed to trip or hold or slash guys who stink. And you can do whatever you want to Karam McDavid, you know. And I just think if, like, refs don't want to get into a situation where, like I said, it feels like they're calling 15 penalties a night or whatever. But maybe Connor McDavid just draws. 15 penalties a night sometimes. Yeah. And I don't know how you square those two things that, like, people don't want all these power plays, but also, you know, and then it becomes a situation of, well, if we call

that trip on Carr and McDavid, do we not call the next one, or do we call, you know, like, I get that it's kind of more complicated than just call everything that's in the rulebook. But, like, I think calling everything that's in the rulebook is a good. jumping off point. Players are going to adapt to whatever method officials use to use to call games. I think that's an important thing to remember. So figure out what you want. And this, I think it's fair to say is what the NHL wants. Otherwise, they would do it differently. And be consistent with it. And then the water level will return to normal. Like if you, I mean, it's like if you say you're going to call whatever, crackdown on interference or whatever it is, yes, there's going to be that adjustment.

period. But if players know that this is the way it is and these are the way you're going to call games, then they're going to change their behavior accordingly. So it's like they have the stomach to try to, you know, start calling games differently in the regular season. But it's like, then they get 20 or 25 games in, which isn't enough, clearly isn't enough to elicit like an actual behavioral change. And they pull the plug. And then we're back to square one. So find something and stick with it. And you'll see the players respond. And then we'll, all be in a better spot. And we won't have to keep doing this shit every single year because it's really, really annoying. Or, well, or we will do it every year, but the line will just move and we'll

argue. That's also, that's the league has done this because they did it with slashing, right? When a few years ago, they were going to take out slashing. There were a bunch of calls. People were like, oh, geez, you can't even tap a guy on the glove now. And then it just, we kind of just stopped talking about it because the players adjusted. The big one was, obviously the 2006 season where they had the crack down on some of the clutch and grab stuff. And I've heard people say, yeah, they called it for a year. There were eight power plays a game. Nobody liked it.

So they stopped calling it and everything went back to normal. Go and watch any NHL highlights from the mid-90s until 2004. It's unrecognizable. How much hooking and holding. Like I tweeted out the one clip of Eric Lindross where he's like just skating up behind Mark Messier and he just reaches out and hooks, like, just hooks right past Messier. And Messia's reaction isn't to look for a call or anything. He just, without even breaking stride, just puts his stick out to try to hook Lindraud's

back and go right back. And that's what hockey looked like. And you almost never see that. I'm not saying there's no hooking these days. But that being just an accepted thing doesn't happen anymore. The crackdowns do have a big impact. But Sean's right. You can't do it in the middle of the playoffs.

So obviously this is something you have to do at the start of the season. You got to have the stomach for it. And then you hope it pays off by this time. But I do think we would still be arguing about. We just find something else to argue about because we're fans and nobody wants to say my team got beat tonight. Yep. When there's a ready-made excuse ready to go for it. Yeah.

And it's time for another Sean Victory Lab. Yay. Oh, yes. Oh, man. Stanley Cup commercials. How is that going down there in the States? Are we going to... What have you guys got?

Are we going to run this back for year two since we got a... We might have to. We got a lot of requests on the Discord for that. We got a whole story and a CBC appearance out of that last year. People love talking about commercials that they hate. That's right. I forgot. We went on like CBC rate, which is like,

like the Canadian equivalent of going on NPR, like a really serious discussion, and it was the two of us just goofing on commercials. I don't feel like the Canadian ones have been awful quite yet, although there certainly are a few that I could maybe offer up. Yeah. Is there anything at the Terra Terra level happening in the United States? Ryan? The Rupert commercial with the turtle.

Yeah, Rupert's tough. Yeah. A guy doing a, I would say, bad Bobby Moynihan impression, gets a, buys a turtle from a sketchy website, he says. And he's worried that he's going to get fraud done to him. And, you know, they turn the turtle over. And on the bottom of the turtle, it says, like, you're not responsible for any fraudulent purchases on your account. And he's like, oh, that's great. nice one, Rupert.

The way he says Rupert, like, drives me up a damn wall. I think he... Is the implication there that he bought the turtle on, like, some kind of weird black market animal trading website? I think that's correct, yes. That's dark. Yeah, and especially because it's like, oh, I guess Discover lets you, like, go on the dark web and use...

Yeah. You want to buy Ordilon on the web so you can eat it at your little free... kitchen table, go right ahead. Yeah, very, very annoying commercial. And as with Tara Tara, Tara last year, every single break. Every single break, there was a little while where there was an iPhone commercial with the Candyman song from Willy Wonka. That was also very annoying.

But that seems to have stopped and been replaced by a different annoying Apple commercials. So they're not, I don't think, I don't think they're quite as memorably obnoxious as they were this year. Like I, I don't, I don't think there's the earworm factor of Tara, Tara, look at her go, or that, or the Pepsi commercial that you were talking about, Sean. I feel like they're kind of garden variety annoying now and less, less, less, like, obvious hooks that people are going to lose their minds over. But it's still pretty early. And there's still time. This is, uh, heroes don't always immer.

at the first, first week. I hope. My pet theory is that there's more companies that are willing to spend money on advertising dollars now because we're far enough outside of the initial wave of pandemic stuff, where it's like it's not just Geico and Pepsi and, you know, yes, we just talked about Discover, but there's a little bit more of a, a little bit more of a variety there, so we're not seeing like the same thing twice on every break. Speaking of bad marketing.

Major League Baseball, put out some new hats, and then immediately unput them out a few hours later. I saw some of this come across my timeline, but being baseball, this feels like it's more of an American thing. What the hell just happened? I mean, the Canadian example is that on the Blue Jays hat, they had Putin. Like, I think that kind of sums it up where it's like, oh, yeah, that classic Toronto-specific thing. Yeah, we're going to throw a horrible clipart puteen on the side of on the side of these hats. It really was unbelievable. I literally, I went into this half thinking that I would just do a bit where I acted like that was completely normal just to twist the knife on any bunch of at all people listening.

But I can't do it. They've had a rough enough week. I'm not going to. That was terrible. You're not going to claim that the Toronto area has the best Putin. on earth, right? Yeah, it's great. I mean, it's French fries, gravy, cheese whiz, that's exactly the way it's supposed to get.

Classic. It's good stuff. Classic poutine. Yeah, so, like, the gimmick with these hats was, it is a normal standard hat, but with, like, the design and everything, the base

design is the same for everything. But on every hat, it's all the area codes that you would associate with the team, I guess. a thing that is like identifiable from the state. If they won any World Series, I think you get like a little thing that indicates what the World Series you may have won. And then on the back, it's a piece of, like a kind of local cuisine, basically.

And a map of the state therein with like the year the team was founded. Pittsburgh didn't even get area codes on their hats because there's a clothing brand here. This is a long story, so I'm not going to tell it. But there's a clothing brand here that has a trademark on putting the 412 area code on stuff. So New Era just was like, okay, fuck it, fine, whatever. We're not going to do the area codes for Pittsburgh and then just left that part of the hat blank. Yeah. The ones I liked were they didn't have anything crab related on the back of the Orioles hat

because there was a crab on the side of the Orioles hat for some reason. So instead, where everybody has been. put, you know, like... The food thing. Boston bottle, lobster roll. Arizona, I think, was a burrito. Again, the Blue Jays had Poutine for some reason.

Instead, so instead of food, they just put, like, a caricature of Edgar Allan Poe. Yeah, right. Who, if I'm not much mistaken, like, just, mostly just, like, died in Baltimore. He went to Baltimore. He went to Baltimore to die.

Yeah, like, he didn't have much of a, like, a life there, if I'm not mistaken. Like he spent a lot of time in New York and was from Boston. And they were like, who's a famous person who dropped dead in us? Like, why not just put like a DVD box of the wire on there at that point? Jesus Christ. This felt like an NHL level unforced error like in merchandising.

I was surprised to see this happen at baseball. This feels like the thing that happens to hockey. Yeah. This feels so NHL that it actually surprised me to double check to realize. I will say, the Boston Red Sox one is, no, like this is very specific to Boston, I think, but there is a very specific breed of Boston area dirt bag who just has all the things that they put on the Red Sox hat, like as a shitty tattoo. including the Red Sox logo and like their area code and all that kind of stuff. Like I thought that like I said, you know what, this obviously isn't for me, certainly.

It's not, hold on, hold on. Very specific kind of guy. It's not for you because you already have all these things tattooed on your body. That's right. I don't like to double up on my iconography like that. But like literally I can see where, you know, like all. like all the Chicago dipsets have the little stars from the Chicago flag on on their on their arm or whatever like I can see where that's reasonable. But yeah, I mean, this is just like it's what's so fucking funny is like, like Sean said, Pittsburgh didn't even get an area code.

Some teams only have one area code. And then for like Chicago, there's, I think eight area codes on there. And it's like, this is maybe too busy. Also, Cleveland got the pierogi. That's not fair. Did Cleveland get a parogi? Yes. What did Pittsburgh?

Did Pittsburgh get like a sandwich with fries? I don't know. That's a good question. I'm not sure that we got a food to tell you the truth. I'm going to scroll down. The athletics site. No, Pittsburgh's instead of a food, Pittsburgh, like a famous food city.

Instead of a food, it says in like big block letters. Yinser. That's right. I'm not fucking joke. There we go, baby. But like San Diego got a taco. Did these things actually disappear? Like, are they? Is this already dead?

I think so, yeah. Like, it was hours. Like, two or three? Yeah. Yeah. And like all the people who can't agree on anything, all united on Twitter to be like, this sucks. And within hours. Tampa got a pay.

penguin in lieu of any kind of food? Or penguin. A flamingo. Tampa got a flamingo. Toronto got Putin. What did Washington get a hot dog? I think the Oakland A's had like a palm tree or something. All the California teams had palm trees.

Yeah, that's when I think Oakland, I think. Yeah. Tropical parrot. They should have had Marshall on Lynch's face. Yeah, and Oakland also had a taco. Every California team got a taco. like a Taco Bell, like hard shell taco. Yes, that's right.

That's so cool. That's, what's the food for New York? A piece of pizza, of course, that makes perfect sense. Yay. And then A is like Chicago like a thicker slice of pizza? Yes. No, no, it's a full deep dish. It's a full deep dish, actually.

Wow. What the hell is Milwaukee? Somebody at the NHL got fired for not thinking of this. Milwaukee got, Milwaukee had cheese and beer, I think. Didn't they? Isn't it a wheel of cheese on the front? Well, cheese and beer are on the front and side, and then in the space where the food usually is is an indistinguishable thing.

I can't tell what it is at all. The NHL is livid over not being able to get in on this. Yes. Their knockoff version is coming soon, I guarantee. Watch somebody else have a bad idea and then go, okay, how can we do this slightly worse? And then put it out there. be like a Leafs jersey, but instead of, like, it'll be like half the Maple Leafs and also

it'll turn into Poutine. I mean, bottom line, everybody loves putting pins on their hats. So why not replicate that with shitty patches of... Fabric. That is kind of what it looks like. They look like enamel pins, except it's all, you know, completely random, like clip art kind of style stuff. Also, I'm looking at it.

The Detroit Tigers have a cherry on the side of their hat. Why? I believe that someone said that that's like a Traverse City thing. I guess it's like the Cherry City or some shit. I don't know. Yeah. And when we think of the Detroit Tigers, what's the first thing that comes to mind? Traverse City, of course.

Oh, my God. All right. Let's take it home with an overrated, underrated, favorite, least favorite. I think the suggestion was Summer Olympic Events. Yes. We're seeing more and more commercials for it down here on NBC. This is apparently going to happen. Yeah, but like I just keep going, oh, I guess that is like a month and a half away.

It's insane. That's wild. But. All right. Well, let's let's do that then. Overrated Summer Olympic event. Ryan, what do you got? The one where you got to, where you got to run and like it's like an obstacle course, what's that called?

Is that even a Summer Olympic event anymore? Yeah, steeple chase. I think that's part of the, that's part of the decathlon, I believe. That's what I thought, yeah So you're just taking You're taking the entire decafon or just Yeah, fuck it. Okay, we get it.

You can run and throw stuff, cool. The other thing I will say, though, is if they want to replace that with some sort of an American gladiator-style gauntlet, okay, now we're back in. Sean? Oh, I thought it was you. I'm going with

I'm going with swimming. Don't care for it as an activity. Don't care to watch it on TV. Don't need it. Stupid. Swimming was mine as well. Oh, see, I sincerely do like all that. And it's, for a slightly different reason.

And that's that, I actually like swimming as an event. I like race events. It's, it's, happens slowly enough that I can understand. I just don't like that there's, like, the same dude is in 18 different events. And he can come out with, like, I won 12 gold medals. I'm the greatest Olympian ever. And you're like, no, you just did the same. You had two good weeks.

You won the 50 meter and then you won the 55 meter and then you won the 57 meter. And like, just pick a thing and be like, this is how the sport works. But I respect it. I kind of, part of me wishes that hockey did the same thing. And had like, yeah, we have five on five. We have four on four. we have 210-foot long ranks, we have 190. And like Sidney Crosby just goes and wins 18 gold medals.

That would be cool. So maybe this is more jealousy on my... Is this the start of McIndoo versus Phelps? You're starting a few. Yeah, it could be. It's calling you out, maybe. Underrated, Ryan. You know, I think they're bringing it back this year.

I think baseball's back, right? It is. Yeah, that rocks. It's so fucking cool. Like, I, as a limit, you know, obviously, baseball is normally rated in, in the United States and probably Canada to a lesser extent. But, like, I love the idea that it can be an international event and guys are, like, excited to play it and that kind of thing. I think that's cool. Yeah.

My under. Softball was great, too. I feel like they, I think they took that out. So, I think, that was. I think softball's back, too. Seems like it. Hell yeah. Okay.

That'd be great. All right. My underrated is archery. I had to cover a lot of the 2012 Olympics for sporting news, like, from the office. So that meant a lot, and it was in London. So that meant a lot of waking up at, like, six or seven in the morning and just watching whatever bullshit was on. So I could do my horrible little 300-word posts about whatever happened. Archery is a blast, and it's, like, always on at a random time, because nobody gives that much of a shit about it.

but I will actually go out of my way to watch it during the Olympics. There's something about it that just works, and I feel like nobody talks about it all that much. Yeah, that's a good one. For me, rowing, partly because, again, I like a good race. It's also something that Canada, it's one of the rare summer Olympic sports that Canada is especially good at. And it's also one of these things.

There's a lot of sports where I look at it, and I'm like, I can't even get my head around. what's happening here and how you would do that sport. Whereas this, I'm like, yeah, I, I, I understand I could sit in a boat and I could row without any training whatsoever. And also my shoulders would explode after 30 seconds. So I can like completely respect the insane athleticism that goes into it. I, I would like maybe someday to be like the guy who sits at the end of the boat and just

tells the team to row. I feel like the coxswain really appreciate it. Is that what it is? Yeah. I feel like that would be helpful, right? We should have that in every sport where somebody just stands near the athlete and tells them, like, don't forget to jump. Thanks, man. I've been training my whole life for this.

The coach is skating next to Sidney Crosby going, shoot, how? Shoot. Yeah. Favorite. Ryan. Basketball. Yeah. Okay.

And how about this? I just looked it up on the Olympics website. There's going to be three on three basketball in the Olympics this year. Yeah. What is the deal with that? I just saw that, and that sounds cool as hell, but is it? Yeah, I mean, it's just basketball, but with three guys. Is it going to be NBA guys again, or is this?

You know, that I don't know, actually. They should just go full-on Big Three style where, like, Ice Cube is the actual Olympic coach or whatever. That's one of those things, too. It happened a few years ago, and we're obviously a year later than normal on on the Olympic schedule. So I had completely, at some point I knew that that was going to be an actual Olympic sport, and I've since forgotten it.

So looking at the list, I'm all in on that. I just pulled up the men's Olympic roster, and it's nobody from the NBA. Canyon Barry, Robbie Hummel, Dominique Jones, and Kareem Maddox, it says here. I've heard of three or four of those guys from college hoops, though. Yeah, they're all college guys. it seems like maybe only one of them is even vaguely a professional at this point. Robbie Hummel definitely got drafted. He was, he played for Purdue, and he was pretty good. I'm not sure, I'm not sure what he's been up to the last few years, but he's an actual player.

Let's see. Yeah, Canyon Barry is in the G League right now. Robbie Hummel is a former professional player, and now he does TV stuff, I guess. but they it seems like a lot of these guys just won the the three on three five uh or is it FIBA I can never remember but uh tournament yeah it's FIbo okay seems like the a lot of these guys just were on the roster that won the three on three uh international tournament makes sense in 2019 makes sense yeah but would it also be fun to see LeBron just like dunking on a bunch of fucking Serbian guys who've never played before yeah that would be sick That's the whole appeal of basketball in the Olympics.

The bad matchups, yeah. Basketball is my favorite, too. But shout out to the track events. Those are always great. There's still something really fun about watching the 100 meter and, you know, flipping out over it. That's always great. And I did want to say that the one that I almost picked for underrated is handball.

That's a blast. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, and like, you know, there's soccer, there's field. Like, the thing the thing to say about the Summer Olympics is pretty much front to back, it's fucking good. Oh, totally. Yeah, it is. I, you know, we'll get to the least favorites, but I actually had trouble thinking of something that was obviously an event I don't like. Even though it's a lot of stuff that I would never watch, I enjoy a lot of it.

My favorite, by the way, is to piggyback on what Sean said, the 100 meter. I love that it's a heavyweight. fight that only happens once every four years. It's nine and a half seconds, a lifetime of training coming down to that moment. I love the fact that there's the heats beforehand where like the top guys are basically just jogging and winning and like, you know, I'll just peel off a 10.2 and save my energy. And then just the fact that it just comes down to that moment. There's no season. There's no, it doesn't, there's no time for any narratives or anything like that. Just the gun, done goes and you go and again

obviously it's a big deal in the U.S. but as a Canadian we've had a couple of guys that were front and center and it's just it's fun as hell and also the 4 by 100 as well right there that you use of a week later. We'll see what happens by the

a great part I mean a really great part about the 100 in particular is that it happens in front of a PACs stadium and it happens at night wherever you know, wherever, wherever it's taking place. I don't know what the deal is with, you know, with crowds is going to be in Tokyo. But the environment with the 100 is just, is just as good as it gets. There's, there's like, I've obviously never, never been to one, but from everything I've heard,

like, there's no more electric crowd than right before the 100 meter. You just really, like, this is it. We're going to, like, imagine if they play the Super Bowl in 10 seconds. And they're like, okay, it's about to start. Tom Brady's about to take a snap. You just be like, you lose your mind. Like, you can't process what you're about to see. It's so cool.

Least favorite. Ryan. Equestrian, horses don't get medals. That's bullshit. That's a really good one. They don't fucking get him. The horse doesn't get a metal. He does all the work.

Was it ESPN or Sports Illustrator something that had a thing on, like, the top athletes of all time, and they put horses on it? Yeah, that was, that was like racing. It was like the sports century stuff, like in 1999 or 2000, where they had like, you know, secretariat and C-Biscuit and whatever the fuck in the top 100. Yeah. Would you be good with it, Ryan, if like the horses, like, if they had like a podium before it's got to stand? Yes.

And yeah. I would be much better with it. But boy, is it? And like, like, who does the equestrian events at the Olympics is like Mitt Romney's daughter or some shit, right? So like, so the horse not getting the medal is like just the perfect and capital. of like global capital. I agree. I agree.

They're like, yeah, we're going to ride around. We're going to act like I did something. When in fact, I just, you know, literally whipped you so I jumped over something you wouldn't have jumped over otherwise. Horses. Fucking scumbags. Horses are workers. Horses are workers. Like literally they are burden. My least favorite is golf because, A, I'm not that. that big of a golf fan in general. And then the stakes are so low in the Olympics, uh, it doesn't even have the cachet of, you know, whatever, the British Open or one of the majors. So it's like, it's a sport that I don't really care all that much about. And you remove some of the stakes. I'm just

like, I have, I have no time for this. I don't know this. Do like, does like Phil Mickelson compete in the Olympics? Not real. Is that like not really? There's been, there's been guys, there's been like big pros in the past who've done it, but that's not, that's not a normal thing. If I was Phil Mickelson, I'd be like, fuck yeah, I won an Olympic gold medal. That rocks. That sounds like a lot of fun. I mean, it's just one of those things. Like, there's certain sports where it's just not part of the, like, I mean, soccer,

you have the U-22s that are playing it. Like, I don't know. It's just, it's just one of those things. Yeah. My least favorite is wrestling. It's not as good. The costumes aren't good. Nobody gets hit with a chair.

Yeah, it's just really boring, mat-based. And also the fact that I actually, in theory, like the idea of any kind of combat sport, it should be pretty simple. But I don't understand wrestling. I never did it. We didn't have a wrestling team even in my high school. So to me, it's like two competitors. They start to wrestle and then someone's like, stop. It's also just endless with all the weight classes and all the, in all the,

you know, whatever the tournament thing. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not into it. And then half the time I'm like, oh, that guy's, that guy's kicking ass. And then they're like, yeah, he just lost. And I'm like, oh, okay, I don't. So that's on me. That's not, you know, that's me just not understanding a sport. But it's like, I feel like I'm so close to wanting to like it.

And I should be able to understand it. And I just, I don't. And so it frustrates me every time. The thing I, the thing I always think about is when I was a kid and I was getting into like, like comedy and stuff like that, I watched the Craig Kilbourne Daily show. And there was one episode where they had Diamond Dallas Page on. That's why I remember it, obviously.

And he was like, you know what? And it was during the Olympics, I want to say, because they were talking about Olympic wrestling. And he's like, you know what I don't like about the Olympic wrestling? No capes. And it's like, that is the perfect encapsulation. The showmanship of professional wrestling is really what elevates it to a sport we care about. And, you know, they should do it, but then they'd be professional and they'd lose their amateur staff.

That's right. So I guess it makes sense. I was really hoping one of us would have like an axe to grind against trampolines or whatever. Yeah, rhythmic gymnastics. Stupid. Get out of here. But, yeah, whatever. That's fine.

I think that's it. Yeah, sure. This is the part where I would normally close the show in a way that Greg would do. You're in Pucks. Is that, do we do that at this point? Or is that? Yeah, that's it. That's more of the beginning thing, I think.

Find my stuff on the athletic. I've got a bunch of posts up there, including the old guys without a cup ranking was this week. Oh, yeah. So we ask that on Monday, go check it out now. And check out my other show with Ian Mendez on the athletic hockey show on Thursdays, where we only talk about Canada because nobody cares about hockey in the United States. Yeah, dude.

I, Sean, I did want to thank you for getting me a podcast with Custins to be the counterbalance for all the Canadian bias at the Athletic Hockey Podcast. So thanks. Sean, do you want to plug a different podcast besides the one that you and Craig have? Listen to me on Stick to Sports on the Puck to Suit on the PuckSoup Patreon with me and Ryan Lambert. Yeah, and then in addition to the wonderful podcast, Stick to Sports, you can sign up for all the other stuff on the Puckoo, Patreon, including we are going to

do our Supolet episode in the next day or three here. And it is, we are drafting player, we're building a team from the worst teams in

the, in the NHL since like the 74 capitals or whatever. So, you know, 20-man roster, draft style, and we're seeing

who can put together the best team. it's honestly more good players than you would think so I think at first I was like ooh this sounds a little boring

but I think it's actually going to be fun because we're not going to just be like oh here's some guy I've never heard of that had like a 45 point season for the you know the 1978 New York Islanders or whatever the team that finished last in 1978 was

I don't have that in front of me so yeah check that out and then also E.P.Rinkside.com. If you sign up for a year and use the code, I love E.P. All one word. I believe you get three months for free tacked on at the end there. So check that out as well. And that's it for my plugs and this podcast this week.

Thank you for tuning in, everybody. We will talk to you next week. So long. Sticks and hits and goals and saves and slap shots and goons. We've got. Sportly commentary To whatever you commute We also cover movies, TV shows

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