The Hockey PDOcast - Episode 365: The Law Firm of Johnson, Ceci, and Gudbranson

Episode Date: October 22, 2020

Jesse Marshall joins the show to discuss the Pittsburgh Penguins, all of the moves they've made since being upset in the qualification round by Montreal, and whether they've actually addressed the issues their team had to begin with. Topics discussed include: 2:00 Making moves based on your most recent results 10:00 What are you actually getting in Kasperi Kapanen? 22:00 What it takes to play with Sidney Crosby 28:00 Win-now moves, future assets, and opportunity cost 38:30 Jack Johnson, Cody Ceci, and evaluating defensemen 48:00 The problem with having an identifiable weak link 55:00 The future outlook for the Penguins Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices If you'd like to gain access to the two extra shows we're doing each week this season, you can subscribe to our Patreon page here: www.patreon.com/thehockeypdocast/membership If you'd like to participate in the conversation and join the community we're building over on Discord, you can do so by signing up for the Hockey PDOcast's server here: https://discord.gg/a2QGRpJc84 The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate.

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the mean since 2015. It's the Hockey P.D.O.cast With your host, Dmitri... Welcome to the Hockey PEDEOCast. My name is Demetri Philpovich. And joining me as my good buddy, Jesse Marshall. Jesse, what's going on, man? Not much. Thanks for having me back.

I'm excited to do this one. It's a bit risky on our end to record a podcast about the Pittsburgh Penguins because the likelihood of Jim Rutherford pulling off some sort of a trade between the time I record and the time people listen is higher than it is for most teams and most GMs, I imagine, so we're kind of playing with fire a little bit there, but there's certainly a lot for us to discuss here today. There's never a dull moment.

It's been a wild couple months, so we could probably go for a couple hours here if we had to. Well, and the reason why I wanted to do this particular show, beyond the fact that the penguins were obviously active and made a lot of moves, was I do feel like there's a discussion here about the penguins. It's going to start off with the specifics of the moves they made, but it kind of has league-wide utility because they've gone through this sort of trajectory as an organization in terms of going from back-to-back cop titles to where they're at now, and there's a lot of decisions that kind of cross-roaded moments along the way that got them to this point.

And so you can really apply it to any team that you're a fan of. So I think at the root of it, the magnations of kind of roster construction theory and team-building principles are going to be of interest to everyone. So I'm really excited to get into this one with you because I think at the root of it, like there's the sort of the decisions that they made are really telling of kind of how NHL teams operate and how cyclical this stuff can be

where a team can be pulling all the right strings and really be on the right path and then a couple bad results happen and then all of a sudden you sort of lose your way and throw out of the window and things completely turn on their head. Yeah, and I guess, I think from the Penguins fan perspective, it's if you've got to go back to sort of the immediate aftermath, right, of the back-to-back Stanley Cup runs.

And I think the national conversation at that point, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but the national conversation at that point was that the Penguins had really found something interesting in the way that they'd not only align their roster with that, you know, the speed element up and down, three lines. that could attack in any number of ways in a pretty competent mobile defense. And everybody said, oh, well, this is going to be copycat now, right? Everybody in the league is going to steal this. This is going to be across the league now. People are going to play like this. And the first thing that Jim Rutherford did

after winning those cups and having that national conversation was go out and get Ryan Reeves, which was kind of the antithesis of everything that that team was about at the time. And I know we're starting to get... And the reason I'm going to bring this up, Demetri, is I think over time, we can mince things down

and people will complain that we're getting into the weeds. But once you add it all together, you take all these tiny little pieces and you culminate them into one big picture, I think there's a lot of damning parts to it. I think Oster Sunquist, you know,

has been a serviceable player for the blues. Klim Kostin's in the KHL right now may make the blues out of camp this year. Ryan Reeves played a half a season for the Penguins, and the head coach was essentially, you know, I think not forced, but was squeezing out, you know, minutes of ice time and trying to find useful scenarios for the player from the moment he arrived. And the sort of messaging we got from that, Demetri, as well, the capitals, and these other teams, you know, they really, they really, we feel like they really took some liberties with us.

Sure, but you won. Right. So if, if you win, take all the liberties you want. Right. You know, like, I'll take the trophy every single time. And that, that move for me was the first one that, that kind of comes out of left field. And then that vision that you had in that window with those cups, kind of just gets brushed by the wayside. Well, it's interesting you bring that up because that obviously followed the ultimate triumph

for the ultimate success because I was going to sort of intro today's show by kind of talking about how the backdrop of this particular offseason for the penguins was kind of dictated or there was a kind of cloud hanging over and looming over and sort of dictating most of decisions because of this kind of bitter taste left in their mouths and sort of nationally just looking at how they sort of meekly exited the postseason. they didn't even technically make it, they lost in the play-in series of the Montreal Canadians, but normally we see teams kind of overreact to small samples in a best of seven, or in this case, a best of five, and make these kind of widespread decisions based on an

unfortunate outcome. But I think with this Penguins team, and we can get into this, certainly, like, it is a four-game sample, and normally I'd be the one sitting here saying, listen, you run into a throwback version of Kerry Price where he's got like positive six goals saved above expected in those four games and a 947 save percentage and you think, listen, that sometimes happens. You don't want to make decisions dictated on that. But it really is more than four games because the 20 or so games before that, before the stoppage was this kind of downward trajectory as well.

And that's kind of what I'm having a difficult time reconciling when I evaluate this team and think about their future outlook because the start of the season was so. promising and I remember I had you on the show and we were talking about all of the sort of positive things they'd done defensively and how they'd navigated all the injuries they add and how much talent was on this team and how well they were playing and then you kind of contrast that to the lasting image we have now of the penguins the last time we saw them play and the dichotomy between those two is so stark so there are a couple things right so I think the penguins had the the misfortune of getting a good version of Carrie Price,

one that was better than... A really good version. Yeah, when they'd stopped playing, the misfortune of seeing Nick Suzuki blossom into a top six center right in front of everyone, which is something that I didn't think I had on Pegdaz when that series started. And then there was just the malaise of the Penguins. So all of that other stuff happened, sure.

But in the elimination game itself, it only really took 30 seconds to say like barring some sort of unforeseen stroke of luck this game is over you know it systematically and this is I think the first time you probably could say this outright even even going back to last year's Islanders series I don't think you could say this is that Mike Sullivan got out

coached you know his assistants are gone as a result of that I don't know what the length of his leash looks like now, given the results of the last two seasons, but it was very stagnant. And, you know, everyone sort of had that, you know, Montreal is going to try to put a wet blanket over this game, right? It's going to try to kill it. They're going to try to counterattack.

And Tristan Jari being in net kind of give you the hope that maybe that puck playing ability would start to springboard things and you'd start to see more life out of the team. But it was just a failed game plan from the drop of the puck. So I think going into the pandemic, there was an innocuous Tuesday night game against the New Jersey Devils that the Penguins won by the, it was an ugly score 3-1 maybe, I think,

just not even really a great performance, but it was so important that win that everyone was like, well, this could be the one that turns it around. You know, this could be the thing that really makes the engine go. But there are warts that I think they refuse to acknowledge as warts.

And maybe in particular, that the third pairing of Johnson and Schultz and some of things like that had really started to catch up with them. And you got to, I think you got to make the bed you lay in the bed you made a couple times. Well, and I'd say that

elimination game, it feels like another lifetime I go now at this point, even though it only was a couple months ago. But I remember at the time just watching it kind of transpire and just being dumbfounded by the effort I was just seeing. Like it's, you want to

to certainly give credit to the Canadians for their for their blueprint and their game plan and the way they play defensively but i mean in an elimination game like that if you see a team register three high danger shot attempts all games in all situations 22 shots on goal malcon and cross be playing under 20 minutes yeah until almost basically the third period yeah you go through the first 40 minutes with with not even a single sniff of the slot area well and and and so i'm certainly far from it from someone to come on here year and kind of come up with hot takes and be hyperbolic and make too much of one game. But when you watch that, I do understand coming away from him being like, all right,

there's some underlying issues here. We need to address them. We need to stop this ship from sinking further before it's too late, especially given the timeline of Sidney Crosby and Faginianne Malkins still being really, really good and trying to squeeze out every last kind of competitive year you can out of those two guys. And so that's what we're going to do today. That's kind of the plan for today's show. I want to get into how they went about that, whether they're better off for it and kind of dissect

all these moves because they certainly made a lot of them. So for those listening at home, pour yourself a drink, get comfortable and come along for this ride with us because it's going to be a, it's going to be a fun one. So let's start off with, I think, sort of, well, I think it was the first move they made and it was kind of the splashiest in terms of trading Philip Hollander and the 15th overall pick for Casperi Capon. And I remember at the time, it happened this podcast was on a bit of a hiatus and so i wasn't recording you shows and it was driving me crazy just seeing the discourse about it and seeing some of the the takes that were happening on both sides both good and bad and seeing how capon and himself was being discussed as a player and seeing

the kind of discussion or the narrative from the penguin's perspective of the driving force for why they did that trade and i remember just kind of messaging you sliding into your dms at the time messaging you about it and kind of venting some of my frustrations and i'm excited to finally get to actually discuss it kind of publicly on air now. But let's just get into that move and discuss Kappaninan as a player and the fit for the penguins and sort of the motivating factor, why they did it, what he's going to look like on this team and all of it. And you can kind of start this conversation from any of those angles that you want to do so. Well, I mean, if you go back to that Montreal series, the player that was on that spot in the roster, that top line right-wing

position was Connor Sherry. Who is what he is, right? I mean, probably not a player that's really suited for that role, but has a name in the National Hockey League for making the most out of his time there and his initial run with Crosby years ago. Before that, it was Dominic Simone, who anyone will Pittsburgh, will espouse analytically as a player who can help drive play. It was Dominic Simone, right? I mean, the Penguins didn't even qualify him. So they felt like the hole in their top six, your second line being Jason Zucker,

of Gennie Malkin and Brian Russ. That's a great line. I think Jason Zucker could conceivably score 35, 14. goals with a healthy of Guineamalkan. We already know Jake Gensel can put up 40. There was a gap. And I think that they wanted to address that. And what they did was they went out into the market, identified their player and paid a great

price for it. And we have to consider, Dimitri, the environment that Toronto was in when they made this deal. Everyone in the league knew that Casparia Capitan was the captain. casualty of Toronto, that he was the player that had to go. So the Penguins give up the 15th pick overall. They give up Evan Rodriguez, who they eventually bring back later. I'm sure we'll get to that.

And they give up Philip Pollander. Now, the Penguins don't agree with me about this. That much is clear. Philip Hollander can be a tough one to judge because of his injury history. It hasn't played as much as you would like for when he was drafted. But he was legitimately the third or fourth best prospect in your system. Now I know saying the third or fourth best prospect in Pittsburgh is a lot different than it is, you know, going to Ottawa or some other place that's rich with talent. But the point stands.

Why did it was it necessary to sacrifice all of that from a team dealing from a position of, you know, where you essentially had the negotiation advantage? And I think that there was a question for me about this trade and whether or not, you know, where we judge it, you know, years from now is can Casperi captain play with Sidney Crosby? Because the answer to that question in Toronto, you know, for Austin Matthews and the talented players they had there, John Tavares, any number of guys, was no. They did not feel like he could do that. And if you, you know, I think back to when Chris Cunits, you know, first joined the Penguins and was playing with Sidney Crosby, one of it you know frequent comment that he would give to the media was how difficult it was and not only did you have to play with this high level talent that thought the game at a level so far beyond you but when you were on the bench he just wouldn't shut up and it was this

constant constant source of feedback and micro analyzing of the minutiaa of the game and kunits had to really make an adjustment to that. And if it didn't work out with, and this is no disrespect to Austin Matthews, who's an amazing hockey player, but it didn't work out with Austin Matthews, what leads you to believe it is going to work out with Sidney Crosby?

Where you're arguably, now, that's a harder environment, I think. Yeah, well, okay, so the pros for Casperi Cavanagh as a player are he skates really fast, and everyone quickly made sure to point that out when this trade happened. He's still only 24 years old, so you could argue that while agent curves dictate that, you know, he might not be,

have as much room to grow as a player as we might have thought in the past. Certainly, he still got some years ahead of him. And two years ago, you mentioned Matthews. He did play with him about 600, 5-1-5 minutes or so in that 2018-19 season, and they were pretty effective together. And you kind of put that all together, and certainly you could be like, oh, listen, he plays with Crosby, Crosby. He just basically has to retrieve the puck kind of,

fly around, Crosby will get him it. And that sounds great in principle. The thing is with Cappanin, and I think it was kind of telling to see how many people had actually sort of watched him closely and kind of pragmatically thought about him as a player is, I just don't really see a player there that I think, I think Sidney Crosby is going to hate playing with Cappan. I honestly just, I, it's funny because Toronto media loves to pile on completely

unnecessarily and unwarranted, I should say, for William Nielander in terms of, oh, he's so soft, he's such a perimeter player, he kind of hangs out on the outside, he enters the zone and does that button hook and just kind of throws the puck on net. And in reality, this past year, he was like one of the most dangerous players in that scoring chance area around the net in terms of generating looks and scoring from in tight, whereas Capon actually is kind of that player, where he certainly creates a few breakways here or there and if you catch him on the right shift his speed can be intoxicating and you can talk yourself into oh man if he can do this all the time he's going to be a game breaker but in reality what

you get is a lot of shifts where he takes the puck he enters his own and it's kind of a possession killer where it's just going to meekly wind up on that and it's not he's just not thinking the game on a higher level in terms of okay what are the next two sort of steps here of where the puck should go where do I need to go to get something better. And I don't want to, you know, disparate the players sort of smarts or hockey IQ because that's such a tough thing to quantify. But that is ultimately what I think of

when I compare, you know, guys with these physical tools like an Andreasath in a Cue or an experience of capon and where they skate so fast in a straight line. But ultimately, it is a bit of empty calorie flash because when you dig beneath that surface, you realize that, you realize that, in a regular hockey game at 515, there's so few times where you're going to be able to just purely utilize that speed.

You need those quicker cuts in tight. You need to be able to sort of move off of the puck in the offensive zone. In reality, for a player like happening, playing with Crosby, I do wonder what that fit is going to be like. And I think if, you know, I went back and tried to identify his highest expected goal circumstances from the year and see what role he played in those circumstances. And, you know, were these scoring chances and quality shots coming vis-a-vis his work,

or was he along for the ride? And I found a lot of instances, you know, to your point, those three-on-toes with, you know, he's got a center drive, so somebody that's driving a defenseman to the net and is taking the pressure off him as a puck carrier. and then maybe a lateral passing option that again is driving a defenseman away from him, there's time that's afforded in these circumstances, space that's opening up as the play is developing, and then a couple minutes later or seconds later, the puck's high off the glass,

and now that's an outlet pass for the other team. So I get that same sense. And the added value for the penguins, and again, a perceived value for me, is that he's built like a truck, and he can be physical. If you get him in the wall or in those battle areas, he can lay some lumber out there. You know, we can get into a discussion about whether or not that's super fruitful and what role that plays in the grand scheme of a line. But I think that you've heard that when the trade got made.

And, you know, I bring that Ryan Reeves thing up for a reason because that pension, for we need to be physical. We need this fast. This is the best of both worlds because it's going to give us the speed and the physicality. But there's a lot of blanks in the middle there that need to be filled in.

And the argument for me is, you know, people say, well, at the very worst, he's going to make that third line better for Pittsburgh. That may be true, but you gave up a 15th overall pick, your third or fourth best prospect and utility pieces to acquire this players.

So I don't, again, now that we go back to, was the payment, you know, was it correct? I mean, we look at Jack Johnson's contract, right? A player that Jim Rutherford identified. It's, again, hyper-fixated on. And by the way, you know, let's talk about the nostalgia element at play here, Dimitri, and both of these deals. And we could take that all the way back to Carolina, Eric Cole, Corey Stollman, you know, any number of players there. the Jack Johnson deal everybody kind of felt like that contract was a little bit you know Jim Rutherford gate out a contract that was appropriate for competition where there was none

Brandon Tenev great player last year by the way unbelievable for what for the penguins but that contract you know it's just it's hard sometimes in these circumstances to separate contract from player and there's an there's an identifiable pattern of finding something fixating on it and then paying a price that maybe isn't necessary. Well, I saw, I forget who it was, but it was brought up when this trade happened of how this is sort of Jim Rutherford's M.O., where he identifies a player he likes,

he kind of locks in on it, and he will just get it done. And regardless of price, like, he just wants that player, he's going to add him to his team. And I do think that's admirable in terms of, like, decisiveness and, like, having conviction. Yeah, of course. It's a good quality.

The problem is, and this is what GMs bump into so many times when they're just pure sort of like hockey talent evaluators. There's a business component to this where you don't have an infinite amount of resources to improve your team. There's an opportunity cost. There's a limit in terms of draft picks and cap space. And so when you're kind of understanding the market and leverage and all these kind of like really simple business 101 quality, you need to use that to build your team because you can't just be like bidding against yourselves and paying a premium because the question isn't did you improve the Pittsburgh Penguins? It's did you do the most with assets you had to improve them?

Do you have other ways now to improve them? And so for me, when I look at this trade and I just think because you're right, like in theory it could improve the third line. When the Penguins made this move, I think it was pretty clear they envisioned him retrieving the buck for Crosby and playing with him and giving him that speed element to help avoid what happened in Montreal where they were able to kind of blanket him and give him fits. And I just think when I view Crosby, and especially at this point of his career when he's attacking in the offensive zone, he's kind of like that like a wily quarterback where he's not

really beating you on the first read. He's kind of waiting for the defense to make a mistake and waiting for something to open up and it comes on the third or the fourth read. And that acquires smart players to play with him to keep moving. and keep finding those open pockets to receive the passes. And that's where this question of how Kaepernan fits with him and whether those two skill sets will actually be able to mesh at five on five really becomes debatable for me because I do think that for Crosby,

you really need a player that can think the game along that level with him. And I just, at this point, we haven't seen from Kaepernan to suggest that he will. I understand it's kind of limited sample sizes, but he played like 200 minutes or so this year with John Tavares, 5-15 and the results were quite frankly dreadful and his impact on the ice were really poor and so beyond just being able to skate fast i've yet to see a tangible argument to suggest why crosbie and cap and it would actually make sense together as as talents let me first just state apropos of what you said a moment ago uh that i'm the crosbie the aging crosbie demetri gives me

distinct 2001 era comeback Lumue vibes. In that, he did not dart around the ice and bowl people over like we had come, you know, accustomed to him doing over the course of his career. He embarrassed you in other ways. And I almost prefer cerebral pick you apart, Crosby with the third eye in the back of his head to the one that could burst through defenders and score these highlight real backhand, you know, on one leg goals. because I think what you get out of them now is a player who almost elevates the expected goal outcomes,

the shot volume outcomes, the scoring chance outcomes of his linemates in a much different way, in a much more, dare I say, direct way, Dimitra, where now it's coming off his stick, right? So to your point, we look at Jake Gensel, who I always say is the son of a coach, and you can see it in the way he plays hockey, he will find space where there is none. and he's almost ghost-like. He scores so many goals standing alone in the middle of four defensive players on the other team. And you just wonder, how have they not seen him? What is, what is?

But he's just got a way of lurking, lurking, and then finding that space. And Sidney Crosby will wait for him. And you'll watch Crosby go in the corner, not looking at Jake Gensel, looking at the fender, looking at the goalie, looking at Chris LaTang. But he's watching Jake Gensel, and that moment comes, and then that puck's off. office ticket it's in the net. Does anything about Kisbury Kavanaugh strike you as the kind of player, that he's the kind of player that's going to go out there and kind of do that? I mean, I think that one of the biggest criticisms you could make of them is that sometimes in the offensive

zone, he's aloof in a bad way. That's not good. So I want to pin what you've said about this asset resource management piece for when we get to the defense because we haven't even begun to crack the surface on this but we live and die in Pittsburgh right you have to understand by this window this this ambiguous window the window is the is the villain right it's staring all of us down at the time is expiring it's almost as if we've been given X number of years to just live right And we're trying to elongate it as much as we possibly can. Right. But I feel like what we've essentially done, though, is screamed about the window closing as we jam it down ourselves.

It's kind of like now we're in our search for, you know, this next HBK, whatever it might be. You know, we've taken, I think, really, Demetia, to saying that results, past results are not important because they didn't happen in Pittsburgh. So anything that didn't take place in this team, this environment has changed. And I think whether that comes from what happened with Jamie Olexiac kind of turning it around here, we know Matt Niskin and did Justin Schultz for a brief period of time. And a brief period of time. That's a whole other conversation. I don't think Washington is paying for what they think they're getting.

There were brief moments for these. Eric Good Branson, another great example. There's almost like this hubris that comes up with that, that we can do anything here. We can rehabilitate any player and mold them into what we want, ignoring all the opportunities in times where that did not work. I literally have a note on my paper right here I'm looking at that says Matheson and then equals and then jolt's hubris question mark

because that's, like we'll get into that deal more, but that's exactly what I think of where a team has kind of a home run or a really big net positive move and then they sort of talk to themselves and do, oh, we can just execute this again and just keep doing this over and over again and just completely throwing past results out the window. But like that window we talk about with Crosby and Malkin and sort of, and I get that a lot every time I discuss or every time I tweet about a penguin's move or transaction, you get a certain segment of the Penguins fan base that comes back and goes,

what do we care about three, four years down to window? What do we care about the fact that the penguins inherited those extra couple years on the back end of Matheson's D.O. and he'll be in his 30s. what do we care about this first round pick that probably won't play for the penguins? By the time, you know, by the time they're in the lineup making a big difference, Crosby and Malkin might not even be here anymore. And I think that that's just such a misguided way to look at roster building because it implies that you have an endless amount of like first round picks

or premium assets to be able to trade, where in reality, the conversation is, could you use that first to improve your team down the road in a more significant manner than this? And that's ultimately what the conversation comes down to. Not did the Penguins get better having Kaspari Kappanenner, as opposed to this first round pick on their team three years down the road. So for me, it's interesting to see that kind of brought up over and over again

every time the Penguins make a move where it's like, who cares about this future asset? We need to improve this team now completely missing the forest for the trees because you're like, oh, you could use that asset to do something more significant that will actually improve the team more than what you'd used it on at the moment. Correct. So this is a big one. What would that first round pick have netted you in another environment? It's not, I agree, Dylan Holloway or Caden Goal versus Kisbury-Cappen-Cappen-Conversation. I think in addition to this, we think about the future. And we talk about the future. And we talk about talked about some of these contracts, the Brandon Tannenve deal.

We'll get into Mike Matheson. You look at his contract. That was pretty much, Dmitri, feel free to disagree, regarded as the worst contract in hockey that they picked up. Well, you could make that argument. One of the... Non-branched Seabrook Division? Sure. Yeah, there we go.

Now, I think, you know, you start to wade into a conversation of... Certainly, when now is real. And you can do that. There's ways to focus on when now. Without, I mean, we think about the letter that the Chicago Blackhawks just sent out, right? Juxtapose that with the letter of the New York Rangers sent out. Now look, New York Rangers. They got lucky.

They got a lot of luck in the lottery that helped them. They also made some savvy moves and signing Panarin and Truba and did things that accelerated, that helped them accelerate that turnaround time. So these contracts and these decisions in the asset use, to me, are some of the things that make the difference between you being Chicago, you know, five, ten years from now, or being New York. And it's hard to get out of some of these deals. And you're just, you know, I know we're not thinking about the future.

But all I see this doing is really elongating the post-Crosby-Malkin pivot that's going to inevitably take place and making it much more harder for someone to navigate. Yeah, term kills you in this league. I think attacking on those extra years on any contract you inherit really limits your flexibility. And it's kind of the thing that I was thinking of the most when I was prepping for this show because at the start of this Rutherford-Sullivan combo when the Penguins won those back-to-back cups beyond having Crosby and Malkin on the team, the thing that I sort of admired the most or viewed as like the most replicable blueprint for other teams to follow in terms of

building a successful sustainable contender for years to come was their contract outlook where you know they had crosbie and malkin and kessel at the time under contract for a handful of years in latang and flurry i guess but for a lot of their skaters they weren't tacking on those extra years they had a lot of flexibility in terms of their ability to year in and year out improve their team kind of reload on the fly and they've really gone away from that i guess it started like when they gave patrick hornquist that big deal and they started sort of uh kind of going away from that MO and that's something that i look at and and that's kind of really telling to me and that's when teams really start to get desperate in my opinion and when they start sort of giving players that are

ultimately might improve the team but are kind of replaceable and aren't necessarily uh core foundational players, those extra years, because that really limits your ability to pivot or change your trajectory or get better on the fly because teams just aren't really going to be in the market and that interested to take on a guy who has another three, four years left on his deal if he is a questionable asset. And the farther you get away from the Stanley Cup, the further, I think the harder that sell becomes. I think Patrick Cornquist going to Florida is a unique circumstance for any number of reasons.

but that sheen starts to wear off the mystery around, you know, the mythical things those players did in that playoff run become so far in the rear view that, you know, you're not selling that anymore. Yeah, I, you know, to your point, you could even make the argument, I think, that the genesis of this goes back to Chris Kunitz, who is fondly remembered for scoring a triple overtime goal against the Ottawa senators to launch the Penguins of the Cup, but has forgotten that it, it's, went like, what, 24 games before that without scoring at all. And, you know, it kind of just become a passenger more than any kind of driver in play. So the Hornquist trade was one that I think was difficult for people who believe in big time and tangibles to swallow. But I think most people were okay with it, given the fact that his availability was so slight that the dollar permit. minute you were paying for him at this point was just difficult to justify. Okay, well, we'll put up in that for a second.

We're going to talk about that Matheson for Horanquist swap and sort of the blue line now and get into more of those moves that we have alluded to. We're going to take a quick little break here to hear from a sponsor and there we're going to do all that. The NHL may be on a break, but your business isn't. And similar to teams who are looking for new players in free agency and looking for bargain deals and players they're going to be able to help them out moving forward, you similarly have to keep moving.

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and traded away, or I guess traded away and then traded back for at some point. It's truly remarkable. You do rarely see it. Like we joked when Brennan Sod got traded recently by Chicago about how they've basically lost every single time they've either traded Brennan Sod away or traded for him. But for the Penguins, it's remarkable how many times they've seemingly flip-flopped on talents. I understand that sort of situations change and certain opportunities arise. But for them to, in such a short order too, and I guess the sort of apex of that,

was basically renting Jamie Alexiak for a while and trading him back for the same pick you traded for him in the first place. But it's just, I mean, what a remarkable list. I was putting it together. And then it was just like at some point it got accrued so many names that I kind of just stopped and gave up because it basically could have filled a full page in my notebook of players that could fit that bill. Sure. And, you know, I mean, Connor Sherry is one. We had him, you know, that experience last year, Evan Rodriguez, most recently is, he came over from

it wasn't qualified the trade tree and this is an all-timer trading the first round pick and these are mixed results and some of these trades were actually good but trading the 2015 first for David Perron which became Matt Barzow

then a year later out to the month trading David Bron for Carl Haglan who obviously had a great run with that HBK line and two years later trading Haglin for Pearson then a year later or I guess a couple months months later.

It was a couple months later from November to February, trading Pearson for Good Branson, and then a handful of months later, again, trading Good Branson for a future seven. And I guess, you know, you could point to it, be like, listen, that trade tree involved Carl Haggan, who was a key member of two Stanley Cup winning teams, so ultimately who cares? But just in terms of asset management, in terms of, you know, just the details of what happened there, that is a very.

Jim Rutherford sequence for me. It is. And now we start to wait into the conversation, and this is a frequent one in Pittsburgh, I've got to give Jim Rutherford a ton of credit for just being willing to suck it up and move on from a mistake. But eventually you get lost in the fact that all you're really doing is chasing this long list of fixing mistakes or rectifying issues that were never rectified fully. and you don't ever really come full circle and it's a lot of tinkering, right? I think to your point, look at that tree tree alone.

That's not even to get into, I mean, there's just, I mean, I'm sure that you could probably dig up some unbelievable ones. It's just never really ending. And, you know, Greg, oh, Gren, yeah, sure, he's made some shrewd moves. You know, Tanner Pearson, that didn't work out. You know, he was able to move on quickly. But that's always almost like never ending. and what do we do in six months, you know, eight months if Kessbury-Cabinet doesn't work out,

doesn't fit in on either the first or third line. Does that become a problem that needs to be fixed? And if so, are you now fixing a problem that you gave up all those assets for eight months afterwards, you know? You know, again, don't get me wrong, that these are, it's good to be able to fix an issue and to be able to move on and not, we see tons of teams get attached to just bad wingers. All of the time. They'll never move on. Or they do and it's too late.

But you know, you're in an endless cycle of fixing. You are. You get kind of emotionally attached. And then you sort of, you kind of double down and you don't acknowledge it some cost. And sometimes you see it in the form of, well, we paid this player. So we're just going to keep feeding them premium mice time and making our team better worse as we go along as opposed to either trading them or demoting them.

But it's really tough to sort of go to your owner. I admit that we just spend a bunch of money or trade. all these assets for this player and all of a sudden we realized it was a mistake and we're responsible for it so it's great that he's able to do so and a lot of gms can't in this league but when you have to keep going back to that well and keep doing it you have to wonder whether the initial process is flawed and and that's a great segue for us to talk about the jack johnson buyout to talk about the cc signing to talk about the mike matheson trade to talk about this penguin's evaluation of defensemen and whether that's a blind spot and sort of what the outlook for

the team is moving forward with that and and the reason why i say what johnson is because it's just amazing to sort of see at the time when he signed that five-year deal for 16.25 million in the summer of 2018 there was just so much sort of uh puffing out of the chest and comments about oh this player is actually good you you don't know what you're talking about the penguins are going to squeeze all the value they can out of this and then just seeing how that quickly that sort of deteriorated to the point where they had to buy them out this year and have him on the for six more years, including nearly two million as a cap hit in 2022, 2023. And it's just, it's been amazing to, I don't even want to say vindicating because it's,

I feel bad. And I also, it's like such a dead horse at this point that beating it just seems like, you know, low-hanging fruit. But it's, man, the Jack Johnson thing is just the entire saga and sort of how Mike Sullivan ultimately couldn't detach himself from it in that play. and how they kept trotting him and Justin Schultz out there. And even in the second half of the season when they had injuries and they promoted Johnson to the top pair with Letang and sort of how that kind of nicely dovetailed with the teams declined defensively. I mean, there's just so many angles to take from it.

Where do you want to start off with when discussing this team's blue line and kind of the decision and the talent evaluation they've done with some of the pieces they brought in? Well, let's let's think about this. Flat cap, right? Big, big financial and economic changes in this league. across the board. The Penguins, as constructed currently, because they haven't, they haven't just gone out and gotten Mike Matheson,

Cody, C,C. Obviously, you mentioned they're paying Jack Johnson, which anything, mostly any Penguins fan, would be ecstatic to hand that money out. Them, they just started go-fund me if they had the opportunity. They've kept Yusolecala, right? It was a young Finnish defenseman, just recently over to North America that they just seem super reticent to play, period, point

blank, despite really, really pleasant on-ice results, super positive on-ice results. Granted, Demetri, that's with the old six-paring babysitting going on there, right, and making sure the deployments are super friendly. But when you're on a third pairing in Pittsburgh, you're always in a friendly deployment because you're probably playing with Crosby or Malkin. Right. What's not friendly about that? But regardless, Chad Roo-Weedle, another player that could have potentially gone in the Cody C.C. One that's played in the playoffs, one that we're very familiar with, one that just has not been given the opportunity to play.

All those moves culminate in the Penguins entering camp with $11.2 million, 14% of their cap to numbers 5 through 8 in their defensemen group. Now, that includes players with other clubs, by the way. By comparison, Crosby and Malkin combined for only 22% of the cap. 20, so, you know, so you're dedicating all that cap space to Matheson, C.C., Rikala, Ruiedel, Johnson, and Nick Bugstad, six players, two of which are elsewhere, and two of which will not play, just by rule of numbers. I mean, seeing, it's a 4D chess move of having, having Jack Johnson land in division with the Rangers. So maybe that is, you'd pay that price just to see that happen to see him submarine that. But I think with, and you and I were treating messages with this about CC.

I think it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a too nuanced take for Twitter because everyone kind of just want to dunk on him. And certainly, whatever anything Cody Cici happens, I love to share that video of him missing the net by the biggest margin I've ever seen in that play in series against. Columbus and his puck skills are truly laughable but I will say like you know for one year 1.25 a common refrain is well he's going to play on the third pair it might be a seventh defenseman it's one year for that price like who cares and similarly I'm shaking

similarly Rangers fans said the exact same thing when their team signed jack johnson except the Rangers only have two left-handed defenseman right now right but so I mean You know, and where is he going to, he's got to play somewhere. But here's the thing. Like, C.C. is going to play somewhere on this team, too. And the penguins are chronically hurt. Well. This defensive group is chronically injured.

This is like that, it really is like the money ball scene where you, as a GM, you kind of have to take the toy away from the coach because you can't trust them to use it properly. And so for C.C., if you're using them correctly, it's fine. like he's a replacement player whatever but we've seen i mean how could you have with any good faith that the penguins are not going to play him too much or give him too much exposure considering what we just saw in the most recent viewings with jack johnson like i just think this is going to be um a classic situation where you go into the year and you're like it's not a big deal cc's not going to play that much and then all of a sudden the game started going injuries start happening you go well like he's pretty big you know he's kind of toolsy he uh was a form

top pick, we're going to kind of give Cece a bit of a longer look here and see if we can, you know, get more out of him than he's had in his previous stops and it's going to lead to the same very predictable, very unfortunate results. And I can, like, it's exactly what's going to happen and you can see it happening. And I find it kind of feels insane because it just keeps, the cycle just keeps going on and on. And it's like the teams don't acknowledge that this is just repeating itself. History really is repeating itself here.

The best part about hockey sometimes Demetri is the me-me-ne-ness. of it. Yeah. Right? Let's take a step back and acknowledge that in a very short window of time, the penguins have had, Eric Good Branson, Jack Johnson, Justin Schultz, and Cody C.C. Some of them at the same time. That is truly astonishing.

And for them to have had the success that they've had in those windows is even more astonishing to me. So I'm going to start with your point about deployment. A lot of people, and I'll use Jacques Martin as an example, and if Rangers fans are listening to this, ears to the ground, folks, because you're about to hear a lot of it. Well, Jacques Martin and Sergey Gonchar, they rehabilitated these defensemen. They've changed the way they play the game. No, the Penguins just deployed them in a more sensical fashion.

That's really all it was. They started to reap better results out of Justin Schultz when they didn't play him on the top pairing like Edmonton had. Regardless of whether or not it was out of necessity, they just didn't do it. They put him on the third pairing. They gave him very easy minutes, and they reaped good reward out of it. So, now, to your point, necessity,

is always a critical factor in hockey. And the Penguins, you know, for any number of reasons, you know, this year was Dumlin. You know, they had let hang out. Schultz himself has been hurt so many times. They just, they don't stay, I mean, guys have to go up the lineup. It's the way it works. So you sign Cody Cici with the intention of playing him 13 minutes a night as your number six. And, you know, 40 games into the season, next thing you know, he's playing 22 minutes

the night on your top line out of necessity. And the question becomes, you know, you're not in a much better situation if it's Uso-Riegoa, right? Let's be real. But how big of a difference is it going to be? Well, and you brought this up earlier where it's like, oh, your third pair of defenseman, he's going to look good because they're playing with Krosby and Malc. And I mean, just look at Jack Johnson, for example, when it's two years of the penguins,

he played 2,500 minutes roughly at 5-1-5 spread over those two years, 600 of those. we're with Malkin, or I guess 6, 650, and then 575 with Crosby, so nearly the same. And that's kind of the trap you fall into where it's like, okay, so we acknowledge that this player's flawed, has limitations, especially with the puck on their stick. So we're going to cover for that by playing them with our skilled players. But then the problem is the results, you wind up dragging down the results of your best players. And it's like a very, it's like, it's very insidious, right? where it's like you don't mean to do it but in a way you just wind up bringing the entire operation down

because you're trying to cover you're trying to patch up a hole patch up a hole there and then all of a sudden you realize you kind of look back at you take a step back in the year and you're like oh my god how many minutes did we wind up playing jack johnson with sidney crosby and what were the results and i'm sure that's like not the plan you go into the year with but it just kind of keeps happening and and that's i think what you have to fear here especially if you think ahead to a potential Cody Cici, Mike Matheson pairing, which would be, I think, hilarious, given their respective skill sets

where you have a player who literally cannot make a play with a puck and then a player who makes a lot of plays but also turns it over a ton, and it would be just really fascinating as a sort of psychological experiment, seeing a Matheson, Cody, Cici pair, deal with opposing forchecks and seeing how other teams played that

and whether they just forced either Cici to make a player, whether they forced Matheson into Morse or an old. or how those two would play off of each other because I don't think that's a recipe that is going to like I just It doesn't seem like it was really well thought out from the perspective of sort of mapping out your Your respective skill sets and how those two would play off of each other Let's get into a discussion to meet you about I want to bust the narrative on this podcast Mm hmm people say I heard a lot of people say this people are still saying it It's not a big deal that Cody Cici can't handle the puck because you could just

not give it to him on the breakout, right? I mean, just give it to make sure Mike Matheson's the guy that has the puck. There's other players out there that can handle that responsibility. He doesn't have to do it. It's not a big deal. Maybe I bought the same story, right? But I went back and watched tape on Jack Johnson. I wrote this article for the athletic titled,

why the anti-Jack Johnson people are actually right. Because I felt like I was going, I had to, like, just, after the PR campaign that happened after the playoffs. I was like, no, no, no, we really need to stick up for ourselves here and prove via video that this is what we think it is. So what happened with the Penguins, you know, we talk about D.D, you always hear the phrases in hockey DDD passes, right? DDD passes accomplish a couple things.

One, they waste time to give the forwards an opportunity and often, you know, to get back on a breakout or get off the bench. But more often than not, they just facilitate the puck into the hands of the person who's supposed to have it. Right? So a D-D-D pass would occur when Jack Johnson has the puck on retrieval. You don't want him making the breakout pass. You don't want him to be the player orchestrating it.

So I started watching table when Jack Johnson played with John Marino. Now, you know, Dmitri, you and I both belong to the church. I love me some John Marino. Love him. John Marino is obviously the guy who's going to be the first pass maker in the Penguins breakout and would get the D-D-D-D pass as such and begin to get up. up ice and lo and behold, what did teams start to do? They started to forecheck the penguins in a very particular way in a way that maybe wasn't usual given the circumstances. They would almost do it

laterally. So they would come at John Marino from the side and from the front on their forecheck, forcing him to give the puck back to Jack Johnson. And I saw this over and over and over again. And you could see the frustration almost on John Marino's face. Like, come on, give me a break. You can you let me make a pass? Can I make a pass out? And I realized that this was intentional. Teams were forcing Jack Johnson to play the puck.

And almost every circumstance that he had to was a disaster, as you would probably expect. And I don't know that unless you change the system, Dimitri, or we're in for the same thing with Cody C. Teams are not going to just let Mike Matheson dance up ice with the puck. not try to force it to the guy who handles it like a grenade. And I just haven't seen Mike Sullivan solve for that yet. And I don't think that we should expect anything different. Okay, here's my issue with the idea behind a lot of these moves. You can lump Matheson and Capning here because I think we'd agree like when the Penguins,

it wasn't necessarily revolutionary, but the concept really swept the league by storm when Mike Sullivan took over and when they had their successful run with those back-to-back cups where this idea of playing fast versus skating fast, right? And you'd see the puck moving up the ice. The players themselves, they had fast skaters, but sometimes it's more about kind of thinking ahead and having a quick read and getting the puck up before the other team can sort of get back defensively

and get their defensive shell in place. And with Kaepinan, we talked for 20 minutes on this show about how he skates fast, but it might not necessarily be the most functional. With Matheson, he's a guy who turned the puck over, like the point hockey tweeted out of the stat where last year at 515, one out of five of his basically puck possessions resulted in a turnover. But he looks great in terms of his puck carrying ability where he can sort of transition

the puck with it on his stick. But the penguins, when they're at their best, they don't necessarily want a defenseman to be taking the puck himself and carrying it up from point A to point B because that's much easier to defend for the opposing team. they would rather have him quickly making a decision from his own zone and getting it up with speed to one of their forwards so that they can attack and probe the defense. And so in terms of that fit, that's what's really bizarre to me where it seems like the penguins internally were looking at this and they sort of missed what made them special in the first place. Or maybe they think that they can convert these players into what they want them to play like. But it's just bizarre to me that you would see the success they had for those two years and the way they played and then identify.

two players who maybe skate fast and can carry the puck but don't actually fit the mold of what the penguins were good at to begin with. So there's a kind of a larger problem in the atmosphere here that we haven't tapped into yet. And that's what Evgeny Kuznetsov stole from the penguins in game six in 2017. And it was any semblance of freedom afforded to the chrysletangs of this world or this team specifically. An active defense now, Demetri, is just not something that they will do. And they really haven't since then.

And I think I'm less worried about Mike Matheson. I think the best way to describe the Penguins breakout right now is it's like statue of liberty-based. Hook and ladder your way up. A lot of puck support. They don't, they'll still stretch past when it's there. But the whole idea now is work up as a group of three in tandem, usually. the boards is like almost a fourth forward and you just don't see that go to it with the with the

defense anymore you really haven't since that series against the caps where they really got torched for it and and paid the price all year long and through the playoffs they never learn those lessons and it's a it's you know you can now you get into like the chris fletang frustration in the fan base where the players that carry the puck the most are going to turn it over the most Right? To Matheson, that was an extreme. And I think the tape I posted on the athletic of him from Florida that I found was he'd get behind the net, Dmitri, and just throw it into the crease. Damned if anybody was there.

I mean, it's just like he'd get to a point and be like, now what? You know, now I'm here. I'm below the goal line. What are we going to do? And I just don't see that happening in Pittsburgh only because I feel like that's really been a scaling back. And I think back to Chris Laetang scoring. against the sharks and and and that you know what ultimately ended up being that cup clenching goal for the penguins down low you know below the dots of the circle and you

almost say like you know maybe you could use a little bit more of that because spinning this forward I think the crazy thing is I think the general tenor of this of this podcast has been kind of like wondering why certain things happened or lamenting the fact that they didn't maximize the opportunity to improve their team. At the same time, if I'm just looking ahead, whenever this next season does start assuming health, and that's a big if with this Penguins team, especially after what we just saw last year,

that forward group is arguably one of my favorite groups just in terms of the composition of, you know, you've got Crosby and Gensel, you've got Malkin and Zucker, and if you want to play Russ with them, then you've got that third line with your kind of traditional with Tanev, Aston Ries, and Blugher, and then you've kind of got like McCann and Jankowski and Riggas and whoever else kind of these like moving parts and you can sort of deploy them as you see fit but it's on paper a group that makes a lot of sense and I still really like this team I'm just trying to sort of shake the most recent viewing of them and I guess the final 20 regular season games because you you look at the first whatever 45 games or so from basically October until the end of January early February and despite all the injuries They were winning a lot of games.

They were 32, 14, and 5, but also underlying numbers were through the roof where they were basically top 5 and, you know, all the important 5-1-5 metrics in terms of goal differential. And so I, while kind of it's a pessimistic view of it in this podcast, I do think that there's a lot of really interesting pieces here to play with. And yeah, I guess I'm really interested to see sort of how this team plays and what the true. not true talent, but true outlook for this team is moving forward, whether it was more of that first half and the way they were playing and how they were this like defensively dominant team, really, and maybe part of those necessity because of all the injuries they had compared to the most reason viewing we had of them.

But I don't know, maybe the particular talents they identified in an attempt to improve their team and avoid a repeat of it. Maybe shouldn't be too encouraging because it seems like they're not on the same page of that. but I wonder what next year is going to look like for the penguins because I do like that forward group and I love John Marino. Chris LaTang is still really good. I guess Tristan Jerry is a bit of a question mark in terms of relying on him as the number one starter. But it's still, despite the general tenor of this episode, I'm intrigued. I think the question mark for everyone in Pittsburgh is with that bottom six group in particular,

it's got some really hefty defensive presences in it. You know, Mark Jankowski in particular, I think, is going to step right in and do a job for Zach Aston-Reece. They're very similar players, I think, in many respects, especially in terms of their defensive impacts. But can it score? Is the depth scoring going to exist for the Penguins? You know, can Evan Rodriguez and Jared McCann, you know, carry a load as wingers?

You know, we know that, you know, Teddy Bluger and Brandon Tanev were just really difficult to handle last year. But again, with the amount of ice time, they get sort of increasing because of their defensive impacts and, you know, things that come with that, you know, if Crosby and Malkin aren't scoring the goals, is there enough outside of that to carry the load? And I feel like there were a lot of similarly top heavy teams, Dimitri, going back to like 2015, 2014 Penguins years where they got bounced easily just because if you could load up and, you know, let's be fair. It's not easy to stop Crosby and Malkin, but doing it is changing. The way you could do it is changing as they as they get older. And, you know, that's a big, that's a big question going into the season. But don't you think that the roadmap for this team is, be like a defensively elite team.

Like that was kind of where they were at their best last year, no? I think the backbone really of how they won Stanley Cups. Yeah. You know, it was interesting to see the transition that occurred to the Mike Sullivan era where you were kind of coming out of a period where playing defense was the focal point, right? That the system was geared towards that. And Mike Sullivan comes in and sort of plays defensive vis-a-vis playing offense.

And that forecheck, Dimitri, you know, it sounds silly to say this by it. The adage I always say is you could watch the penguins, you know, in micro 10-minute elements of a game. And if you could see other teams, you know, deferring or having to second guess what's going on because the penguins have one or two or sometimes three guys up there trying to dictate your breakout, that's often just all you need to figure out whether or not they're going to win that game. because if that element's not there, the rest of it just collapses. Yeah, and it was there for large stretches of the regular season, and then it just looked like an entirely different team. I think it's weird because I think part of it was born out by necessity because that third line was really the only one that was healthy throughout.

And at a certain point, Grosby was out for a while, and he goes back, Malcolm was out for a while. And so they sort of had to play that certain way, And then it felt like when they got fully healthy and everyone came together, they sort of miscast themselves or they thought like, oh, now we're going to get back to being this high-powered offensive team. And the personnel just wasn't really there to pull that off. And I don't know what happened there. It seems like there's a big time disconnect between what they actually were and what they thought they were. But like the blueprint, if you go back and you just watch those first 40 games last year, like that there's something.

there. I don't think that's just that's just gone, but the fact that they went out and identified and brought in, kind of like Mike Matheson and Kasparry Kappanin, leads me to believe that they might not be too inclined to fully just dive into that all over again. All that aside, though, I do think that, and I'll probably, you can laugh at me for this if you want, I do think that a Matheson-C-Pairing is going to be better. It'll be better than the Shultz-Johnson pairing. But the bar is so low. You know, we don't ever judge.

It's stupid to judge defensiveness by goals against. We know that's right. Goals against the goal-tending metric. But when you're getting sank at scoring chances and possession and you're on the ice for five of eight even-strength goals, it's difficult to be worse than that. And I think even for Matheson and C.C., they'll struggle to not clear that bar. I think that for, you know, thinking about again, and this is, we're having a lot of stylistic discussions here.

I understand that. But the inaction is what drove the change you saw last season. And it's almost like when you have all the luxuries of the Penguins lineup in there at one time, you have your Latang, your Dumlin, Crosby, Malkin. It's not, I think there's a sense of give them the puck immediately. regardless of circumstance, right? And they don't necessarily want that. You know, Nalcun doesn't complain about it. You know, that's kind of player he is.

But the whole element of it works so much better. You know, looking back at last season, when one of them are out, the buy-in is just there. And I laughed at that when people said it. And it was such a talking point last day. I'd chuckle at it to myself. Like, ah, come on. That's not really what's going on out there. But you go back and look in hindsight and you watch the tape.

And that the spirit of the system, you could almost call it, it just fell apart when everybody got healthy. And, you know, good goaltending masks a lot. And, you know, Tristan Jory kind of hit that wall, so to speak. But, you know, there is something to be said for everyone being in and the element that, again, that systemic element changed so drastically once that happened. Yeah. Well, it's a big question, Mark. I guess we're just going to have to wait to see how it goes, but I'm going to definitely hold you to that comment

about the Mike Mathis and Cody C.C. pairing and we'll see. But, Jesse, this was a blast, man. I'm glad we got to do this. There's no one else I would have rather dissected these X's and O's with you. Fuck some stuff. Where can people check out your work? What are you working on these days during the offseason and get into all that good stuff?

Well, here's the thing. Just in the spirit of toughing it out, I crowdsourced today on Twitter what Penguins fans want to see video of on Cody C.C. It's starting tomorrow, DeBitri, I'm going to, I don't know if I'm going to get like some CBD or something. I'm going to put on some ambient noise and I'm going to throw the tape of the maple leafs on and we're going to just sink our teeth into this sucker and give a little honest Cody CCC video assessment. We need a frame-by-frame breakdown of him taking that shot to miss the net against Columbus and the planes. Thankfully, I have your tweet favoriteed.

easily access it for later looking forward to all right man this is a blast we'll uh we'll definitely circle back to this and touch base once the season gets going thank you before we get out of here i just want to quickly thank everyone for listening to today's episode of the hockey pdf podcast hopefully you enjoyed the conversation uh jesse marshall and i just had um go back into archives and listen to some of the most recent shows we've done we had thomas transohn talking about the conucks in their busy off season or lack thereof um we did a ufa recap with domo shishin and Alice and Lucan. We did a draft recap with Will Scouch. We did a mock draft before that. I know it's kind of outdated now, but you can still go back and listen to the analysis Cam Robinson and

Rachel Dore had on the top prospects in this year's NHL draft. And we've got a lot of fun stuff coming down the road. We'll do some dust off the old rewatchables and do some old games with some fun guests. We'll talk more. We'll do more kind of team deep dives of teams of note and what to think about them moving forward and some of the stuff they've done and then get into some sort of general offseason stuff and have fun with it. So I'm really looking forward to the shows to come. There's going to be a lot at least once a week, hopefully up to two episodes per week at some point. So make sure you're subscribed. And please, as a reminder, if you haven't already, it only takes a minute. It means a lot to us. Just go rate, review the show. Really easy to do.

If you're swamp for time, you can just give us that five-star rating. If you want to actually leave a review and get a bit personal, tell us what you like about the show, what you enjoy about it, what it means to you. That would be great. I really appreciate that. And we'll be back in a couple days with another show. And so until then. The Hockey Pediocast with Dim Filippovich. Follow on Twitter at Dim Philipovich and on SoundCloud at SoundCloud.com slash Hockeypedeof.

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