There Will Be A Lot of Meaningful Hockey Being Played Late into the NHL Regular Season
Dave Pagnotta of the Fourth Period joined the Power Play on Sirius XM NHL Network Radio with Mick Kern and Dennis Bernstein. He was asked about the upcoming NHL regular season and the teams that will make the playoffs, and everyone agreed with many teams already pencilled in; this could be a very intriguing regular season.
NHLRumors.com Transcriptions
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Mick Kern: “You are listening to the Power Play, Sirius XM, NHL Network Radio channel 91 Mick and Dennis with you. Talking to Dave Pagnotta, editor-in-chief of the Fourth Period and all that other great stuff. A few more with him.
Dave, we’ve talked about this. This is the big question, who makes the playoffs? If you knew that, I go and bet a bunch of money and I buy Sirius XM. Look out Howard Stern, yeah. But if you look at it, the incumbents, it is more incumbent on teams to have fast starts, or, let me change that, not to have bad starts. The Oilers were the great exception last year because it’s just tighter and tighter.
Dave and I sorry, Dennis and I both agree. We think the Devils are making the playoffs. So I think the six of the incumbents are back. So that’s one spot for all the rest of the teams, and that’s just the East. I don’t remember it being this tight, and from a hockey fan standpoint, it may be frustrating if your team is in that mix. But as a general observer of hockey, this makes for a very intriguing regular season.”
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Dave Pagnotta: “It really does. I mean, like this is like, you’re going to have some teams, and it’s also going to make, I mean, we’re looking far ahead, so I might as well look a little, a little bit down the road as well going to make the March 7th Trade Deadline interesting to see which teams are going to be active, which teams are selling, which teams are going to buy, which teams that are just on the fringe, feel like they can make a move, that they can add someone, and that’s going to push them over the top.
Because look, it’s going to be exciting, and we’re going to see some teams playing meaningful hockey down the stretch after the trade deadline, going towards April and towards April 17th, the last day of the regular season, where those games over that month, everyone is going to be meaningful. So that just means more engagement and more fan frustration. Yes, but involvement.
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I think it’s, I think it’s healthy. It makes the league healthy. It makes it healthy across most markets. I mean, we know the ones that are going to be the bottom feeders, and then it’s all the fringe ones, like, who’s gonna like, we’re gonna have four teams that are gonna be vying for that final wild card spot, potentially in each in each conference.
And that’s, yeah, that’s exciting. And that’s just gonna kind of enhance the argument that yeah, the talents where it’s at. So we might as well add two more teams, maybe four, and a few more years after that, we’ll see.”
Puck hasn’t even dropped on the NHL Regular Season and we are already looking ahead to the playoffs.
