Dimitri Filipovich

And I'm sure locally in Pittsburgh, it's not going to be perceived that way, but ultimately I have a hard time viewing it as this massive disappointment.

Yeah.

You know what?

I could see it being an entertaining one from the perspective of both teams have been very rush-oriented this season.

In particular, like,

forcing turnovers near the blue line, and then all of a sudden getting off in transition and going two-on-one breakaways.

And so I could see a lot of those, and it will probably be a shot quality battle, ironically, in terms of there not necessarily being a ton of shot volume, but a lot of those odd man rush opportunities on both sides, particularly what we saw from, I mean...

Philadelphia certainly against the Penguins, but even what we saw from the Hurricanes against the Senators tested against one of the best defensive teams.

And so I like it from that perspective of not only the field opening up for Carolina as a pretty heavy favorite at this point in the East, but also having to kind of go through these two tests early on against two of the better defensive clubs in the league in Ottawa and Philly and if they can get by.

It'll probably be a different conference final because they're likely going to face a Montreal or a Buffalo and kind of this high octane offense.

But I think it'll help answer a lot of questions if they're able to look the way they did in round one of like, it's a little different this year for Carolina and they actually might have the offensive juice to go all the way.

That could be a huge advantage for Carolina, especially for what a physically demanding style.

They play under Robert and more as well, where it's not just the four or five games, but like within those games, they're just going max effort all the time on pretty much every shift.

Now, I think one of those games against the senators had like a two overtime game in game two.

And so they did play a little bit more than your traditional, uh,

But I'm with you and we're seeing the advantage of that as well for a team like Colorado, for example, right?

Where they're by the time they kick off their round two series against either Minnesota or Dallas, they're going to have had eight days off.

Whereas Minnesota and Dallas not only played six, seven very competitive games, but a bunch of overtimes sprinkled in.

And so it's going to provide a massive advantage for these two number one seeds in their respective conferences.

Yeah, I mean, they've only scored three 5-on-5 goals in this series through five games.