Rick Stephens

You mentioned about the Eastern Conference standings getting tight.

They certainly are.

You look at, as we record, the Canadians...

the third spot behind Tampa and the Buffalo Sabres with 84 points.

But the Boston Bruins also have 84 points.

The Detroit Red Wings also have 84 points and the New York Islanders who are coming in tonight have 83 points.

Now there's a discrepancy there in that the Canadians have one game in hand on all those teams, but that can disappear quite quickly.

Yeah.

And if you look at some of the points projections, you have like the Red Wings, the Canadians, the Blue Jackets, all around 100 points in terms of projections.

So, you know, there's going to be a pretty good team and a team with many more points than the teams in the West not make the playoffs.

And...

Also, we talked about it earlier, the strength of schedule.

And the Canadians have, at this point, the fifth most difficult strength of schedule for their next 14 games.

So that kind of plays against them.

You mentioned the tiebreak scenario.

It's really close.

The

The issue is that games are tightening, margins are very slim, and the Canadians in that kind of environment, in that kind of hockey, are really struggling as we saw this past week.

And there's still all sorts of talk about that mystery trade that almost happened.

And we'll bring it up one more time, and we'll do that because it was Pierre Lebrun who was speaking with Kent Hughes at the GM meetings, and Hughes was asked, why did you talk about the mystery trade?