Dimitri Filipovic

fighting for his life on twitter yesterday after he announced that he had not had evan bouchard as one of his finalists and he had asked me about what i thought about the ballot we had some back and forths i think it was just i'm glad i didn't have a vote this year for the norris because there's 10 guys you could have made an argument for and someone's obviously gonna feel disrespected and left out and that's just the reality of it but yeah the awards were pretty tricky this year in general

Yeah, there was a pretty clear top four and Celebrini just is on the outside looking at it.

I imagine he's probably going to get a lot of first or second place votes as well and largely fell into fourth just because he probably got the most fourth place votes, whereas those other three were kind of established candidates

I could go either way with it.

I think they all had remarkable seasons, and you can make very compelling cases for all of them.

I mean, clearly, Celebrini did the most with the least, but I also don't love that, as we've discussed on this show before, sometimes the award gets boiled down to, like...

You're on the worst team and you did the best.

And I don't think that should be fair either to the guys who just happen to have great seasons on great teams like Nathan McKinnon did.

So I'm sure Celebrini is going to get many, many seasons where he's a finalist and a winner of this award.

And so the fact that he got to this point already in his career is remarkable in and of itself.

Yeah, I don't know if I'd say they leveled up defensively in round one.

I think they were just the lesser of two evils in that sense against the Oilers, and they got away with a lot of stuff, and the Oilers' offense itself was pretty kind of one and done, and with their best players limited, they didn't pack the same punch.

I've been very impressed, I will say, in this, and it's only two games so far in Vegas, but I thought they were pretty clearly the better team in both of them, and kind of blew game one late with a...

the defensive breakdown off of that controversial icing no icing play it could have gone either way but the effort in grade two in game two was awesome Lucas Dostal came within six seconds of a shutout and so they're playing really well they've been awesome at home all year as you'd expect from a young team and I thought those were the three best games they played in round one when they played at home against Edmonton where they really just kind of ran wild against them so

it's positioned pretty nicely here for them I think the story coming out of this though is I've just been blown away by how good Leo Carlson is like I know he had an awesome regular season and it was sidetracked a little bit by that injury and then missing the Olympics and not playing for for Team Sweden but he really leveled up in terms of points this season watching him and like it's an automatic scoring chance every time he's on the ice he's unstoppable moving downhill made some great defensive plays as well in front of his own net and

outplayed mcdavid in round one even if it was a limited one i think still an accomplishment and outplaying jack eichel so far in this series so i mean that's quite a feather in his cap and if they're able to finish the job here and get to the conference final it's gonna probably require more of those efforts and we're gonna need to start having some conversations about kind of like where he ranks not only within that draft class of his with the fantillion bedard in that season but i think just in general with the best centers in the league and not just the best young ones

Yeah.

He reminds me a little of, of Matt Boldy, where it doesn't make sense that a player like that kind of like lanky and wiry is as strong as he is already.

And he's younger than Boldy, obviously, and doing this at a, at an earlier point of his career,

development arc than Boldy did when he first came into the league so I think wildly impressive I mean especially in the regular season you could see like there was some of those growing pains in terms of like decisions he'd make and near the blue line and turnovers and even I was watching in this Vegas series there were a couple times where like