Hello, Ryan. How are you doing? Fantastic, Bob. Looking forward to tonight, man. It's going to be awesome. It is going to be awesome. It's fun to be a part of. And, Ryan, I'm going to ask you this up front. Do we maybe take a bit of it for granted? And I'll tell you why. You know, the Oilers of the 1980s, great team. Never had four consecutive years where they won a playoff series. You know, the Oilers, obviously, are trying to make it five straight years with a playoff series victory. People forget, 48 points ahead of the Kings, right, back in 82. Lost in the opening round. Went to the finals the next three years. Won in 80, 485. Got beat in the first round by the Flames in 86. Won the Cup in 87-88. Got beat in the first round by the Kings in 89. And then won the Cup in 90. And on the fumes of those great teams with seven Hall of Famers, several of whom had left, still got to the third round in 91-92. It's hard to win. That's the point I'm making. I'm not writing the Oilers off for a second. I'm just saying, from our end. Let's go out of here, Bob. Let's go out of here. Where are you going with this? You know, some read into this as though you're trying to soften the blow ahead of time. No, I'm saying... Oh, I made a mistake. Tyler Hupp could just gave me crap right now saying, Bob, you're wrong. The Oilers lost to the Flames in round two. Sorry, I forgot about the mercy killing over the Vancouver Canucks. Nice job, Tyler. There goes that idea. What I'm saying is, you said something. You're looking forward to it. For us, we get to live it and experience it and be on the periphery of it. And it's awesome to be a part of. But it's taxing on the players, isn't it? Yeah, for sure it's taxing on the players. I think, you know, we've seen that. We watched them grind through a couple of Stanley Cups. It's not impossible, though, Bob. And I, like the Florida Panthers, I'm pretty sure got the three straight Cup finals, didn't they? They did. And I'm pretty sure they won two of those three, including the second and third one they were in. In seven and six. And when the heat was on them. And when the heat was on them after blowing the 3-0 lead. Absolutely. I'm not going to look at the Edmonton Oilers playoff year this year with a sympathetic eye, fatigue-wise. I'm not. I'm just, I'm not. Teams have done it. They can do it. Right? Has it been fatiguing? Bob, have they crushed it all regular season and been the top team in the league during the regular season and gotten to the finish line and just with the tank empty because they played later than everybody else and then they took the regular season a lot off. They took a lot off nights in the regular season, Bob. This is not a team that killed itself during the regular season. So there's some gas in the tank here in the playoffs. Injuries are real. But the Florida Panthers got the three straight Cup finals. The Oilers can do it too. They had a regular season where their foot was on and off the gas all year long. I'm just not buying it. I'm just not buying it. And I'm just not buying it. So I'm not going to say, yep, boy, they just played a lot of hockey. I'm not going to be one of the guys saying that. I get it. But that's part of it. And when you have the world class players that these guys have, you know, the expectation should be to get there. And I'm going to allow for injury. That is a little bit of a different thing. But, no, I don't take it for granted. I covered this team through the decade of darkness where I sat at home or had to go to World Championships while other reporters wrote, you know, covering the team that they covered. So, no, I don't take it for granted. And I'm really, you know me, I'm not a big guy that cheers either way, but I love great hockey and I'm looking forward to this tonight. So are you stocking your expectations, Bob? No. I mean, I expected the team to win 50 games in the regular season. They didn't come close to that. I don't think they got enough out of their support players. I mean, at the end of the day, Connor McDavid had another all-world regular season. Leon Dreisaitl was on pace for one until he got hurt for the final 14 games, ended up missing 17 games this year. Bouchard led the league in defense scoring, and that's where I'm going to go next. And we will talk about Vasily Podkolzin, but game five, the Oilers' big dogs got going. How much of a difference was that for them? Well, it was big. I mean, you know, McDavid, you know, still managed to get two points a game before, even though we call seeing him limping around out there. I think the fact that he played 24 minutes and skated like he did. And the one thing we're not seeing from Connor McDavid, like his straight-ahead speed seems to be there. His acceleration is getting there. We're not seeing that crazy agility left to right, his hard cuts. We're not seeing that yet. So it tells me he's not close to 100% yet because he's not, he doesn't have that all-world agility, but he's getting better, Bob, in the series, and that's a huge break for the Oilers. Evan Bouchard, of the three Oiler players at the top of the food chain, Dreisaitl, McDavid, and Bouchard, the one who deserved the most criticism by a stellar mile through the first four games of the series was Evan Bouchard. He wasn't even close to where he needed to be. And he found it in one game and was exceptionally good. Like the highest high end of his game was there all the way around and it was really good. So that is really big for the group. The fact that McDavid's getting healthier, the fact that Bouchard found it, the fact that Dreisaitl bangs in a couple, the power play's waking up. Like there are a lot of reasons to think that this Oiler group has it going in the right direction, that they're coming around. But this is also the same Oiler group that could not find its high-end game for any more than two or three days at a time during the regular season, Bob. 100%. Like that's an issue. It's an issue. And I'll say this. I think that, I get they've played a lot of hockey, and I get that the regular season could be monotonous, as Connor had said, but I think it's a little bit risky to just think you can do whatever you want during the regular season and flip a switch in the playoffs over and over and over again. Sometimes you run out of luck. And that's what they have been playing. That's the fire that they've been playing with. And so I think in some ways you become who you are during the regular season. And maybe this group, as a leadership group, and as a team, and as a culture in that room, maybe there does need to be a little bit more focus about the importance of the regular season and what it means because you become who you're going to be. They might get out of this one, Bob. They might get out of this tight spot. But it came about because the group did not have access to its high-end game, and that was a result of their regular season. So how much of that is on the players and how much of that is on the coaching staff, in your opinion, Ryan? It's on the players. And the players are the ones that have to go out there and play the game at a requisite. Coaches would love for them all to play 100% as hard as they can every night, and that's what they tell them to go do. Some of them do it. Some of them don't. So it's about a group that can, these groups need to learn how to regulate themselves. How to step on the pedal, how to push each other, how to make sure what's acceptable, what's not acceptable. We saw the absolute crater at the start of the year. Then they kind of got it together a little bit, had one nice little run, and then it was messy for a bunch. Then it was okay at the finish. It was just like, just like an engine revving up and down and all over the place. It's on the group in there to be able to regulate itself to stay at a high enough level. To me, Bob, this is what culture is about, right? What is and is not acceptable day to day to day to day. And I think that this group has the skill and the ability and the talent and the leadership in there to do it. I just think that for whatever reason, they struggled this season to extract that from one another, quite frankly. Well, by the way, Ryan, do you know what today is the anniversary of? Some 40 years ago today? Tell me, Bob. Steve Smith bank shot back in 1986 against the Calgary Flames game seven. And I bring that up because at 20, I learned a great lesson in life. Doesn't matter how good you are, right? Doesn't matter how, because they were good. I mean, those guys were amazing. And I was privileged enough to be on the periphery of it, but watch it