Let's Get Pucked Up

Frequent guests Wyatt Danowski and Spencer Phillips join the podcast to talk NHL Return to Play, and how the NHL is somehow the only league in professional sports to screw up what should be a gimme in adequately supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. The show then transitions to focusing on whether we can remember what even happened in the 2019-20 NHL season to the tune of Wyatt and Spencer competing over a quiz commissioned by your host, Robin Kooymans, and based loosely on a similar quiz published earlier in the week by The Athletic.

Your host, Robin Kooymans, is joined again by Spencer Phillips and Devan Grainger to play catch up on hockey related news from the last month+. Topics include: Black Lives Matter, the Hockey Diversity Alliance, Return to Play, Edmonton and Toronto as hub cities, the newly approved CBA, Draft Lottery chaos, the sorry states of the Sabres and Senators, HHOF Class of 2020, and HHOF Snubs.

Scott Dowler and Stephane Poitras are on as guests for the first in-person podcast record in about three months. We discuss how weird this all is and decide to follow an "order of operations" to keep ourselves on track, so we of course defer to the acronym BEDMAS, with B standing for Brackets/Byes, E for Edmonton (a frontrunner potential hub city), D for Draft/Deadline (as in trade deadline if the NHL were to lift it before the play-in rounds start), M for Marchand (as in will he be smart enough to keep his tongue in his mouth in this pandemic hellscape we live in), A for Alternate Playoff Formats, and S for Stanley Cup Predictions.

Devan Grainger and Spencer Phillips join the podcast again to discuss first the issues with hockey culture and the tepid reaction from people in the world of hockey to Akim Aliu's Players' Tribune article, "Hockey is Not for Everyone," and then the newly announced playoff/play-in format for the NHL's return to play. We then give our predictions for each of the eight potential "play-in" best-of-five series as they have been proposed by the league.

Devan, Spencer, and Robin continue where they left off and make their predictions for the Leafs' opening night roster for 2020-21 (presuming there is a 2020-21 season) and they border on outlandish to disturbingly conservative. Come for the unrealistic trade suggestions, stay for the Nick Robertson should be in the top six on opening night hot takes. Apologies once again to listeners who don't care about the Leafs.

Devan Grainger and Spencer Phillips join your host, Robin Kooymans, from their lockdown locations in North Bay, Ontario and Cornwall, PEI, respectively, to add a little cross-country flavour to the first part of a two-part dive into everything Toronto Maple Leafs. This episode features: a moment of silence for the anniversary of the Game 7 4-1 collapse against the Bruins in 2012-13, a moment of silence for Brendan Leipsic's career asa n NHL player due to his own idiocy, and a thorough discussion of the All-Time Leafs roster as constructed recently by TSN.

Devan Grainger and Wyatt Danowski join as guests to go through the onerous contracts of each and every NHL team (or in Wyatt's case, just talk about players he dislikes since he doesn't do math) and decide which contract for each team is worthy of a hypothetical compliance buyout if each team were allowed one before the start of the 2020-21 regular season.

Wyatt Danowski and Devan Grainger join the show once again as guests as we settle once and for all whose Team Canada roster reigns supreme. Spoiler alert: The title of the episode. We then give an update on the NHL's future regarding future games for the season, Big Buff's divorce from the Jets, the NHL's strange plans to hold the draft in June, and we finally end with a back and forth on which Canadian team we each think will be the next to hoist Lord Stanley's Cup.

Wyatt Danowski joins as a guest to talk hockey in China as well as his picks for international rosters for Teams Canada, Finland, and Sweden under the presupposition of an imaginary best-on-best tournament that would be happening right now. In the times of Covid-19 sometimes all we have is our imagination...

Host, Robin Kooymans, and guest, Devan Grainger, discuss hockey in China, the possibility of the NHL playoffs in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and then imagine a scenario in which there was an international best-on-best hockey tournament being played today. Given this scenario, and imagining all eligible players are 100% healthy, Robin and Devan take a shot at choosing rosters for Teams Canada, USA, and Russia. To be continued next week with Wyatt Danowski and his Team Canada, Team Sweden, and Team Finland.