The Sheet with Jeff Marek - On the Sheet: Pete Blackburn

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

Pete Blackburn joins Jeff Marek on The Sheet to discuss the Bruins, Hampus Lindholm's injury, goalie fights, and much more...Shout out to our sponsors!👍🏼Fan Duel: https://www.fanduel.com/Reach out to [e-mail] to connect with our Sales Team and discuss opportunities to partner with us!If you liked this, check out:🚨 OTT - Coming in Hot Sens | https://www.youtube.com/c/thewallyandmethotshow🚨 TOR - LeafsNation | https://www.youtube.com/@theleafsnation401🚨 EDM - OilersNation | https://www.youtube.com/@Oilersnationdotcom🚨 VAN - CanucksArmy | https://www.youtube.com/@Canucks_Army🚨 CGY - FlamesNation | https://www.youtube.com/@Flames_Nation🚨 Daily Faceoff Fantasy & Betting | www.youtube.com/@DFOFantasyandBetting____________________________________________________________________________________________Connect with us on ⬇️Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/daily_faceoff💻 Website: https://www.dailyfaceoff.com🐦 Follow on twitter: https://x.com/DailyFaceoff💻 Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dailyfaceoffDaily Faceoff Merch:https://nationgear.ca/collections/daily-faceoff Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

He is Pete Blackburn. He is from the very excellent What Chaos podcast alongside DJ Bean. He joins me on the sheet and we're going to kick things off here, Pete, and welcome to the program. Glad to have you aboard. First of all, before we get to any of these topics here, I just want to make one thing straight. Tattoos are for effing losers. Excuse me? I just want to see a reaction as an ink guy. Yeah, I mean, we might be the two of the most secretly tattooed men in hockey media. Yeah, I would always get that whenever I'd just be like in a t-shirt and a dry fit.

Like, I didn't know you had tattoos because normally I'm just, as people would know me, I'm just like a pink balloon in a suit. Like that's it. Like that's what I've kind of always been my entire career. And then when you see like scratches on the arm, it's like tattoos. But then I just assume now that like everybody has ink Pete. No?

Yeah. Everybody has ink. Not everybody has like a lot of ink. Is that I think that's kind of the separating line there. Everybody's got their, you know, like little cutesy designs. So like those Instagram tattoo type things, those are becoming way more popular. But the whole, the whole kitten caboodle, I think is a bit more rare.

Would you ever get a hockey tattoo? Yeah, I would. I actually thought about one. I wouldn't get like a hockey team. Like I wouldn't get like the Bruins logo. I thought about getting the Paddington Bear. But as a hockey bear, I thought that that would be, that would probably be my hockey tattoo move. I'll tell you, as a Canadian, there are a lot of, there's two things. One, there's the Hockey Canada logo. They're tattooed on a lot of beer league players.

And two, there's the Tasmanian devil with the hockey stick. Like the old barbed wire around the shoulder was like the equivalent of like the Tasmanian devil in beer league with the broken hockey stick. That shows up as much as cheap beer coming out of hockey bags after beer league games. Okay, before we get into like, there's a lot I wanna do about Detroit.

I wanna do a lot on Boston with you. I wanna do some Philadelphia. But first off, I wanna ask you about, it's a small thing, but I was trying to make the point with Daniel Sprong. So Sprong gets waved by Seattle crack and no one claims me goes down to Coachella, scores two goals Saturday,

scores a goal Sunday. Like this league is like, he's too good for this league, offensively anyhow, but he's having a hard time sticking in the NHL. Do you have a thought on the hardest place to be or the most difficult place to be in hockey is right where Daniel Sprong finds himself right now. Too good for the American league,

maybe not good enough for the NHL. Yeah, it seems like a really frustrating place to be, especially if you're constantly having to travel and not be able to sink down your roots as a player. I feel like one of the most valuable things for a lot of players is consistency. Consistency in the approach, consistency in your personal life and just being able to get comfortable both with your team and with yourself. And I feel like that's a really hard place to be in if you're constantly,

you know, bouncing from team to team like Daniel Sprong has been this year and bouncing from league to league as he's been this year. Yeah. Okay. Where do you want to begin? I'm going to let you choose. I'm going to hand you the menu and the menu says on it Detroit. menu says on it Boston the menus on it says Philadelphia what would you like your appetizer what would you like for your main course or would you like for your glass of brandy after let's let's do Boston first because it's the oldest at this point but it's also the closest to home. Is it done? Is it like all the Marchant, Pasternak, the 63-88, is that all, has that all, was that just a controlled fire and now it's flamed out?

I mean, you're there, you know, like are there still embers burning here? No, I think that the embers that might still be burning are on the media side, not on the team side, not on the players. Like the embers that are burning are, you know, Rich Keefe from WEI defending himself and saying, here's where I was coming from. And I think from that, that whole player side of it, it probably never should have left the building. And I think that somebody probably fed Rich Keefe something. And he's been right about a lot of stuff that's come out of the Bruins camp over the past year or so. But I think that whatever he was fed this time around was dramatized by him sort of built up a little bit by him and I don't buy into it being a festering problem in the Bruins

locker room, especially given how they'veering problem in the Bruins locker room, especially given how they've been playing over the last couple of weeks, basically since the Christmas break. They've stunk. If you don't have anybody raising some noise or raising them issues within that locker room, I think that's a bigger problem

than what was thrown out there. And I don't believe that Brad Marshann and David Poshnock have a festering problem with their personal relationship that is preventing them from playing on the same line, uh, when they show up to the rink every day. Yeah. I'm, uh, you know, I kind of look at situations like this and like, I, I, like, this is specifically true of Patrick Lyne. So let me, let me give you a couple of examples here.

See, I kind of look at these situations almost like gifts to a hockey team. I know it's uncomfortable and you gotta come out and bark back and defend your team and all that. But I kind of look at it as if that was kind of a gift for the Boston Bruins. Like they spin around the next day and they beat the Florida Panthers, okay,

defending Stanley Cup champions. You look at when Patrick Linae lipped off about Columbus and you know, sort of, you know, their default setting is losing and they're fine with it and they go meekly into that good night and they greet all the losses with a shrug, paraphrasing. That was a gift to the Columbus Blue Jackets. I don't exactly know what their record is post-Linae comments, but I'm pretty sure it's really good Because the Columbus Blue Jackets have been a really good story and kind of started right around that time probably a little bit before But I kind of look at these situations and say this is a gift now has it been a gift for the Vancouver Canucks?

That's a different story But these kind of controlled fires here aren't they kind of a gift for the team because you know Pete as much as anybody if you give a bunch of hockey players one issue, and it doesn't even have to be a good issue, it could be a dumb issue, to rally around, it's remarkable what can happen. That's right, I mean, you need to be galvanized as a group in whatever reason you can find,

especially when things are going as poorly as they had been for the Bruins, if you can find an outside point of reference to say, let's rally around this, rather than, you know, pointing the blame inside the locker room and hating each other because you're losing every night, that is a gift. And if Rich Keef, if that was Rich Keef's intention,

he for sure threw a grenade and fell on it for the sake of the hockey team. I don't believe that that's what he did, but I'm sure they appreciate it nonetheless. Yeah. I don't think that he was trying to put a ribbon on something here for the Boston Bruins. If he tries to claim as such, I think we can look at him sideways, but nonetheless, I think he may have done a solid for the Boston Bruins. We'll see how the week proceeds.

Let me ask you about the Bruins themselves. Now there's only so long you can go without drafting and developing players. And if you go to EP or HockeyDB and you have a look at the draft history of this team, I mean, it's a long time ago, they, you know, Swainman would have been maybe their last elite pick, you know, before that it was a couple of defensemen,

but like it's been, and that one 2015 draft where they had three in a row and now that's turned into feathers. Mind you, I got a defense, talking to someone about this on the weekend. Mind you, the one place where Boston has done well is with trades. Like the Hampus-Linholm trade, Picasso.

Charlie Coyle trade, really, they've done well with trades. Drafting and developing, not so much. Should we maybe not look at this and say, this is inevitable, what's happening with the Bruins? Yeah, I think most of it is that it it's caught up to them a little bit like they're they're lacking of building the roster around the key pieces like they came in, they had these pillars that they built around and they did well for a while to fill in those gaps, whether it was through free agency,

whether it was through trades, and they just never drafted well enough to plug those holes like a team like Tampa did where you had guys in the system and you could fill out the roster and that's where you need to save your money. Like you get those minimum rookie contracts and you plug guys in and they play key roles that really helps you on the cap. And the Bruins haven't been able to do that. And I think, you know, people were expecting them to fall off over the past couple of years.

Didn't happen because you got league best goaltending from that tandem. And then this year, you know, the roster. You can make the case of like the roster in places is a little bit better than it was last year, you know, with, with Lindholm and Zdorov and like those guys haven't been amazing, but they're seemingly upgrades on paper, but really where you've kind of been exposed is that you no longer have league best goaltending. And not saying that this is a full Jeremy Swainman problem, but if Jeremy Swainman had been playing

as like a top five goaltender for this entire year, it would look way better than it does right now. And they're just not, they're not papering over some of the holes that they have in their roster. not papering over some of the holes that they have in their roster. There's a couple of things with Swamen. There was the arbitration last year. Like the one, maybe I coddle goaltenders too much, Pete. Maybe I treat them like these, you know, fragile little pieces of China that should be sitting on the shelf for us to look at in Marvel. But I've always maintained the last player you want to take to arbitration is your goaltender.

Right? Like the story is legendary about Mike Millbury making Tommy Sallow cry in arbitration, sitting across from them. Now maybe it's true of every position, you know, Brian Burke going to arbitration with Brendan Morrison, talking about the elephant and the mouse and who's carrying what and saying to the arbitrator that Brendan Morrison is the mouse with Naslund and Bertuzzi here and he's being carried. Like, that's a dagger. Like this is what arbitration is like.

Like it's like, if you want to, I've always maintained, if you want to do like a real gritty behind the scenes look at the NHL, get the cameras in an arbitration room. If you want to get like the most watchable, like I understand like the draft table trades, like all those types of things, free agency, like that's all really interesting.

But if you want to see like the nasty, the gritty, the real behind the scenes, how, how cutthroat it can be, let the cameras in the arbitration room. That's, Pete, would be a show. But I've always maintained like, don't take your goalie, don't let your goalie get to arbitration. You can get to the building, you can get to the waiting room,

but don't let them walk through that door because there's no going back. And did you not get to the waiting room, but don't let him walk through that door because there's no going back. And did you not get the feeling that Swainman has carried this thing with him and he ain't gonna let this thing go? What he heard in that room, he ain't gonna let go off. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if Sweeney and Neely made him cry, but they definitely pissed him off.

They definitely pissed him off. And that has been very, very obvious for like almost like 18 months at this point. Like even when they were filming the Amazon series and they were following around Swainman, like he couldn't, he just kept bringing it up. It was like, yeah, he was very, very sour. And then letting it fester

and letting it carry into camp this year. After, by the way, you had already traded Linus Ohlmark the other half of the tandem. So like that you didn't hold those cards and they allowed it to carry into this season, which never should have happened. And it never should have gotten to the point where they were. Cam Neely went to the press conference and aired the grievances, whether he was rightly frustrated with the media leaks or not. It just could have been handled so much better at a million different points.

And it just seemed like they got off on the wrong foot to start this season with a player that was far too important to this roster as is currently constructed to to allow that to happen. You know, on morning Cup of hockey the other day, last week, as a matter of fact, Andrew Raycroft was on. To me, this was the best I've ever heard. Andrew Raycroft, the guys had him on for like half an hour and he was breaking down the Boston Bruins. And the one thing like right away, the first thing he mentioned was the Hampus Lindholm

injury. And, you know, there's an old saying, I'm gonna butcher this. I think it's from Bertrand Russell around turn of the century. Something like that. You can rightfully expect a man to be able to walk on a tightrope for two minutes, but you can't expect a man to walk on a tightrope

for two years without falling. Like you can put up with not having Hampus Lindholm for a little while, but after a while, your warts really show. And I'm not saying it's all Swainman and it Hampus Lindholm for a little while, but after a while, like your warts really show. And I'm not saying it's all Swainman and it's all Lindholm, but you start to add things up and then, you know, to your point, the way things are handled sometimes, it's kind of like, man, this looks like

you're roller skating down a gravel road, the way you're handling all these things. Like it's step on rake, step on rake, step on rake. But I thought the Hampus-Lindholm thing was really interesting. That as we talk about underrated and undervalued players around the NHL, I remember when he played with the Anaheim Ducks, someone out west saying to me,

like look, I know all you guys in the media are crazy about Drew Doughty, I'll take Hampus-Lindholm. I'll take Hampus-Lindholm over Drew Doughty all the time. Like you're crazy, you're eating space cakes. Like no, I'm telling you, I would take Hampus-Lindholm. This is like a significant like player power person in the Western Conference. Like how much do we look at this and say, yeah, it's the goaltending, but it's also you don't have Hampus-Lindholm. I, first of all, I don't, I don't agree with the Lindholm over Doughty thing at the peaks of their powers. They're even close to it.

home over Doughty thing at the peaks of their powers or even close to it. My counter to that would be if your team can't survive the loss of Hampus Lentolme then it's not a good team and that's nothing against Hampus Lentolme. At his best he's a very important part of this blue line but he's not the most important part of this blue line. He's you know he's a very important part but you should be able to survive a loss of a player like that. You look around the league there are teams that survive losses that are worse than that of Hampus Lindholm. It's a very important part but the roster is so thin that you really can't, you really, you're doing a lot of damage if you're taking away

any of the important pieces from this team. That's how thin it is Where are Bruins fans laying the blame here? I mean they've already moved a coach You know there used to be an old saying you know before you before you fire a coach, oh, that coach a trade, that doesn't happen anymore because of the salary cap. Where is everyone? We'll move on here from the Bruins page, but where is everyone laying blame here in Boston? Well, I went to a game last week and it was the Bruins-Oilers game and I don't know if you caught this, but the crowd, the crowd very vocally laid the blame at the feet of Don Sweeney and I think that's where

most Bruins fans fall right now. A lot of them were mad about Jeremy Swainman and the number that he demanded and then didn't back up with his play to start the season. He's been much better of late and I think that most fans are just a little fed up with Sweeney and Neely and the fact that they didn't see this coming or didn't protect the roster enough to see this coming. Okay, I want to get ahead of myself now. Although this could apply for the Boston Bruins too. It could also apply for the St. Louis Blues.

Having a conversation with someone on the weekend who brought up an interesting point because we were talking about coaching changes and he said do you realize that in five of the last six seasons there has been a team who has changed coaches midstream that have made it to the final four. Craig Borubey, bonus in the board in 20. Dom Du Charme in 21. Woodcroft in 22. And Chris Knoblach last year in 24. Are the Detroit Red Wings going to the final four this year? Seven game rip, Pete. I don't believe so, no. I'm glad that the Detroit Red Wings have found a little spark, but operating at over 50% on the power play, I don't think is...

No, that's good. It's super sustainable, right? No, they'll stay there. They'll stay. Yeah, I think that's very, very sustainable, for sure. I actually thought you were going in a different direction. I thought you were going to mention the St. I thought you were gonna mention the St. Louis Blues who have been much, much better under Jim Montgomery.

Yep. They have, although I still don't like, I look at the St. Louis, St. Louis Blues, I look at and say, like, I still don't know who they are. I kind of describe them as a nice bunch of guys. Like, but I say that about every single player on that team. Like I love Robert Thomas. Like I think Robert Thomas, we'd have, again, I'm going back to the underrated

and don't talk, I think Robert Thomas is one of the best playmakers in the NHL. Um, I still don't know what I'm getting night in and night out out of the St. Louis blues. It's, it's a number of different teams all at the same time. And if you're the Vancouver Canucks, you love that And if you're the Vancouver Canucks, you love that. If you're the Vancouver Canucks, you love that Utah can't get their act together

and there's still a lot of coyote there. And you love the fact that, you know, when push comes to shove, Craig Conroy's gonna do what's right for the future. So the Vancouver Canucks probably are okay as far as a wild card spot goes in the Western Conference. But I don't know who St. Louis is. I have no clue.

But we're starting to see the beginning, sorry, I'm all over the place. We're starting to see the beginning of what the wings are and that is under the new coach, Tom McClellan, this is a really aggressive team. This is a really aggressive team. They're aggressive, they look like they're inspired, they look like they're having a little bit of fun, which I don't think that that any of that was applicable under

Derek Lawn. Like some of Lawn's final games there were, they're tough. They were some of the most uninspired looking games that I've seen for a team in a long time. And so it's especially with him being in the last year of his contract, if you knew that he wasn't the guy, I was just like, we had this discussion early on in the year on our show, like saying, you know, we know that red wings don't fire guys in season, but like, what is the purpose of hanging on when it looks like this? And so, you know, if this is the beginning of the eyes are planned, coming into focus, if this is the beginning of the ISER plan coming into focus, if this is this group finally getting, you know, some value and some spark out of what they are,

which I don't think that they're a great team, but at least they are a palatable and at least entertaining team over the past couple of weeks. And that's a step in the right direction. How did you see the Philadelphia Flyers versus Cutter Goetje on the weekend? And boy that must have felt great for Jamie Drysdale scoring that goal. And it was good to see by the way, it was really good to see Philadelphia Flyers fans acting like Philadelphia Flyers fans. That's always great when your stereotypes of fan bases come to life.

That was a Philadelphia Flyers crowd. Oh yeah, and honestly like the worst thing that Cudder Gochier could have done is go out and score two goals the next day. Next night. Because he looks like a big old coward for not doing it the previous day. Yeah.

So yeah, I mean tough, tough night for him, but it was, it was awesome to see from a, a Flyers standpoint, you know, things haven't been amazing, but that was an amazing day for Flyers fans, an amazing result. I said it last year when all that stuff went down. It's cool to see the Flyers have an F-U mentality, us against the world, Philly versus everybody. If that's where they need to rediscover that identity

and he's the guy that they need to target to do it, then let's do it. I'm for sure into that. And I heard you talking before I came on, like sports so much better when there's hate involved. And I feel like so much of that has been snapped out of the game because of all this Instagram, like sub-tweeting and you mentioned, like guys used to fight each other and like, I don't want to see guys go out there and kill each other, but save some of the nastiness for on the ice. But this is all like,

this is what's happening now in hockey. Like you're right, I mentioned it before he came on, like once upon a time, two guys didn't get along., well they, you know, they faded back to center ice and the gloves came off and sometimes the elbow pads did too and you made sure you had your tie down, tie, you know, and you were ready to go, right? That's the way it used to get solved. Now it's social media. How much of it, how much of that is that like these guys know each other and have more of a direct connection to each other, even if they play on different teams? Because they can be connected through social media, they can message each other, they can

be in contact as much as they want. So they all play together. Essentially blame the players association. Essentially go all the way back and blame Ted Lindsay for getting this all started because they're all brothers in the union. I hate it. I I miss when guys like hated each other's guts it was and that's why even for like a guy like Jordan Bennington who has ruined my life and I will I will hate him to the day that I die for what he did to my Bruins

I can respect that like he goes out there and he causes problems even if it's usually in a 6-1 deficit in which he's given up five goals on like 14 shots that's when he has his temper tantrums but I do respect that like he he goes out there and he doesn't care about being well liked. It's kind of one of the reasons why I like Nikita Zdorov. Yeah, oh yeah. Like there's a guy that gives about two thirds of the square root of sweet FA about what people think about him. Yeah. Does not care.

I'm a Boston Bruin, I'm a Vancouver Canuck, I'm a Calgary Flames, me versus everybody. I don't care, I'm not here to make friends. Radko Gudis, same way, not here to make friends. Not here to be chummy with anybody. But there's, like I know I set off a topic, it sounds like old man shakes fist, but that is still lacking.

And I know I have fun, like last week, holy smokes, like New Jersey Devil social media versus the Rangers is just, it's like from a social media point of view, that's vicious. Let me see that on the ice. Let me see some of that on the ice a little bit here too. But to the point about, like, well, sort of bring all this together

as far as giving a team an issue. Philadelphia Flyers had an issue that night. Philadelphia had, Philadelphia Flyers had one issue and that was Carter Goche. And that was the rallying point. And the other player who came out of it, now he denied that he was asking for one, but blah, blah, blah, I don't believe that for a second.

The name's Tucker, not sucker. Travis Konekne saying, let's go, we'll do this right now. Like that's what you're talking about, Pete. That's like, no, no, we're doing this right now. Let's go, I'll fight you right here, right now. Like, I'm sorry, man, like everything about that night was Philadelphia and I always say, that's the moment that Travis Connecti became a flyer,

but man, it sure felt that way watching that game. It was good to see. It was also great to see Michkov with the little stick twirl after the goal. Like all that was, it felt like they all had it going and they were feeling themselves, you know, both like aggressively from a mean nastiness standpoint, but also from a team standpoint.

So like that was just a good night to be a Philadelphia flyer. Nick Davis in our chat says, Pete's ire for Bennington keeps me breathing minute to minute with the light in this. Oh, by the way, you have a, my guess, and I know they don't meet very often, but my guess that's maybe more of a hope

is that it's Pyotr Kochetkov who gives Bennington his first fight. Cause that guy's got a little snap to him too, right? Like he's got, he can have a screw loose. And that's why it's like, oh man, please just give me like a St. Louis Carolina final sorry NHL Close your ears a st. Louis Carolina Stanley Cup final just in case like just just to see that one Do you have a clubhouse leader for who we almost saw with Marc Andre?

Flurry is finally going to give Bennington his fight. I like I sort of hope that it's not Cocheckoff because like you can't have Two psychos go at each other. They both might whip out a knife in that fight and try to shank each other. Somebody needs to be a little bit more level headed. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they also don't meet very often. But Jeremy Swainman, Jeremy Swainman has been looking for one for like two years at this point, and I know I've talked to him.

He wants one. He wants one before he retires. I could see Bennington being the guy that pulls it out of him. It just like it would have the right moment would have to present itself and that I don't see it happening given that they only meet two times a year. You know what? But at the same time too, let's put another log on this fire.

You kind of want a goalie to come out of nowhere that no one expected to be able to throw down and just start feeding sandwiches. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Like you think about that Felix Potfan, Ron Hextall fight that everybody delights in. There were two people, like I know this well. There were two people that night

who knew that Potfan was gonna beat up Hextall. One was Felix Potfan and the other was his coach. All right, so Pat Burns used to be a cop in Montreal and the Potfan kids were sort of well known as, not like street punks, but they're like street tough, always getting in trouble with kids. So Burns knew that the Pot Fan kids had that in them. And Burns would talk about it,

said, you know, I saw Hexthall skating down the ice and I'm like, Ron, stop. This is not stop, Ron. There were only two people in Philly that night who knew how that one was gonna end. It was the goalie and it was the coach. And that was it. Okay, I got you for a couple more seconds here.

I do wanna ask you about the Buffalo Sabres. So the point that I was trying to make before he came on, I'm not sure if you saw, did you see the Lindy Ruff press cut? It lasts like three minutes. I didn't. Don't blink. But he talked a lot about, you know, this was embarrassing.

This is after the 6-2 loss to Seattle. I'll paraphrase Lindy for you. He talked about how everything was embarrassing, how they were playing, we need to do this instead of that, and they're making this mistake. And to me, this was Lindy Ruff walking right up to one very specific line. Like I think that the worst thing you can call

a hockey player is soft, and he wasn't calling them soft, but he was calling them another S word, which players would get their back up, and that is stupid. Like he came right up to the line of saying my team is dumb. When you look at the Buffalo Sabres there's a lot of problems and now Lindy Ruff has come right out and said like it was honestly it Pete it was three minutes of saying this is embarrassing this is embarrassing this is embarrassing and walking off stage. I don't know what's gonna happen with the Buffalo Sabres. I don't know what's gonna happen with the Buffalo Sabres.

I don't know what Kevin Adams is going to do, if anything, at this point. But when you look at the Buffalo Sabres, what comes to your mind first? Because Lindy Dreyfus is right at the line where he's calling his team dumb now. And we still have more games to play. Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing, and it's not a new thing,

like there's just a lack of culture there. There's a lack of, you know, there's a lack of experience. There's a lack of like senior leadership at almost seemingly every level. And it's, and you can tell like from a game to game basis, like it seems like sometimes they just take their hands off the wheel and let the car drive itself, but it's not a Tesla. It's not like one of those, those cars that has the assisted driving.

They just let the car go wherever it takes them. And then it's given up six straight goals to the Seattle Kraken who aren't a good team. It's been one of the worst teams in the league over the past few months. Like that is, there's no other word other than embarrassing and humiliating. So like that's just a problem that the Sabres have had for years at this point. And it just feels like it's not going to change until something changes at the top. And like from a senior leadership perspective, they need players who have a better idea of how to get a grip and control on things and grab the steering wheel and direct themselves where they want

to go. They also need that in the front office. They need it on the bench. They just need it at every level. They need more leadership. They need more of a direction and they need more of a culture and they just don't have it at any level at this point.

I look at the Buffalo Sabres more so than any other team in the NHL, Pete, and I say everybody is playing one level higher than they should. This player is a first-pairing defenseman, this player should be a second-pairing defenseman. This player is a first-line set, this player should be a second-line set. And that's all throughout the lineup. Like every single player is being asked to do so much more than they should. Like I'm with you, like everything is out of sync

in Buffalo, right down to every single player is slotted incorrectly because they don't have anyone to play in the correct slot. So all of a sudden, how did this guy end up on the first line? Well, who else is gonna be on the first line? Quick plug for what chaos. Give us the latest, the 411, the 555-1212. Give us the info on this great pod with you. And by the way, so I tune in and I'm getting like tons of football, football. I know like nothing

about football. I'm listening to this and I refer to this talk as Portuguese. So I recognize all the sounds and you're talking about sports, but I don't understand any of it. It's Portuguese to me. But give our listeners and viewers a low down on what chaos. An excellent hockey podcast. You and me both, because we started off today's show

talking about the NFL for like five minutes and I had no idea what was going on. All I watched was the talk show and Texas let me down again this weekend. So I just excluded myself from that conversation. But yeah, every day, noon Eastern, Monday through Thursday, we have Dylan Holloway on tomorrow. We sat down with him at the winter classic and talked to Oilers, talked blues, talked to the offer sheet stuff.

He was great. I think people are gonna love it. So we have him on tomorrow. Was a big fan. He was very very impressive and he's having a great season. So we got a bunch of stuff in the can that we, you know, player interviews, things like that coming up. But Holloway tomorrow and every day at noon. You know what's interesting about about Holloway here? So there were two other teams, I'm sure you know this, there were two other teams that were prepared to offer sheet Holloway and Broberg, Calgary was one. And we talked about how now fights exist now

on social media, not on the ice. And the Oilers and the Flames used to settle their scores on the ice and the games would take four and a half hours. Man, if that were the offer sheet that would have gone through and if it wasn't St. Louis, and I think their preference was St. Louis, but if Calgary was the one, all of a sudden Dylan Holloway goes down Highway 2

to Calgary. They would have had to match, right? They would have had to find a way to match just from an optics standpoint. Listen, I get it. I know if you're Stan Bowman, like, oh man, I'm getting totally hosed here. I'm gonna get killed. New general manager back in the NHL.

I've thought about that a lot. Like if it were Calgary and not, and there's one other mystery team that I still can't figure out. But if it were Calgary. I think I know the mystery team. What does it rhyme with? I've got an idea.

Okay, don't say who it is, but who does it rhyme with? The Moss de Muens? I've got an idea. Okay, don't say who it is, but who does it rhyme with? The Most Amuans? No, no, no. In the Eastern Conference. So, okay. The, the, the, the, the, the Smu Hackettes. The Smu Hack? You know, it's funny too, because they've, I've,

we all wonder about, you know, with Mitch Marner so many years ago I don't think that was surprised anybody although I don't know what you're okay on that we'll wrap you're the best pal let's let's do this again you'd be good I slept 16 hours last night, every day this week, every day this month I can't get out my head, lost all ambitions day to day, cause you can call it a rut I went to the dark man, he tried to give me a little medicine, I'm like nah man that's fine I'm not against those methods but I knew It's me, myself and how this gon' be fixing my mind I do wanna back it up I turned on the music

I do wanna back it up I turned on the music It's enough to help battle that you're sometimes losing Helping on the days that went wrong