The Kevin Karius Show - Mar. 6th, 2026 - Mark Spector

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1:01As we welcome in, Mark Specter from Roger Sportsnet. Good morning, Speck. Open up. Boys, trade deadline. Day, let's go. Haven't had any yet today, though. Hey, Sir, time to get after it. Well, actually, it's more of a concern here in the studio. Speck is Eddie Steele's eating banana bread with hard boiled eggs on top of it. Whoa, that sounds ridiculously geeky. Oh, I like heasty. One might eat those separately, Eddie. Why would we put them in the same combination? Have you ever just cut up a hard boiled egg and put it on a piece of buttered toast? Yeah. Not banana bread, Eddie. Yeah, it's just the same deal, though. Same, especially when the banana bread is just made so well by the baker acre. Oh, he's not going to be happy with you, Eddie. I would think that baker would be displeased that you've solid that excellent banana bread with a hard boiled egg. Well, you know what's not displeased?

2:02These biceps, when it gets that protein right to it. Hey, Speck, we had a couple trades overnight. Sort of, you know, late last night and into the wee hours of the morning, pending where you were. The big one I just mentioned it again, John Carlson, to the ducks because it has pretty heavy duty oil or implications because that's the team they orders are chasing. And they could play the ducks in the first round of the playoffs here, too. Oh, for sure, absolutely. There's a, you know, relatively good chance that could happen. So, you know, the really good young ducks on the back end, Jackson, the Coleman, those guys, and Zellweger, and they're all young. So, having John Carlson come in there and help lead that blue line group, and, you know, he won't be there for long. I mean, he's only, he's already played at the 1100 some games. But having him come in there as a little bit of a guy to lead that group in the right direction. That's a real nice play by Patty for B. He'll help you right now for sure.

3:04And his legacy there will help you for years. Yeah. And as Duke was saying, you know, obviously he's the big ducks guy. Basically, you just move everybody down a peg as far as the right D. goes with Truba and Goudus. And, you know, I guess that leaves even more out of the picture. If you're looking at a top six role, but I mean, you could, you know, he's plays forward. He plays, you know, wherever as a kind of a rover guy. So I don't know. The ducks scare me. If I were, if I were the others and I were playing the ducks in the first round, they scare the bejesus out of me. Good roster, man. They got a nice looking team. And I mean, here's what we don't, we know, here's what we know. They're going to be a force in the Pacific, you know, for sure. What we don't know is how soon that force is going to start, right? How quickly, you know, this is their first playoffs. If they make it, which I'm sure they, I think they will. They missed playoffs for seven years there. So, you know, the history of teams, I mean, when the orders did this in 17, they came in, they went around, they lost the next round in seven at a time.

4:05But then they missed the playoffs for two more years. And no one saw that coming. So, you know, it's always a process, for sure. But at a high, I'm patty for beaks. You know, I want to say, if you missed the playoffs for seven years, you should be getting good by now, right? You should be putting the team down after seven years out. That's got promise. And Pat for Beaks delivered the General Manager at Anaheim. He's delivered that team as a ton of promise there. It's the same thing in Buffalo. It's just taking them twice as long spec. Yeah, right. Like, that's, that's too long. It shouldn't take 14 years, sorry. But all these teams, Utah, Utah's good. Damn, right, they're good. They've been Arizona and Utah have missed the playoffs for however many years. I don't know, they've been brutal forever. So, yeah, you should be good. It's the teams like Calgary that get you, that never get as bad as those teams were, but never get any good either, right? At least those teams have a future in them. I'm not sure where Calgary's future is today.

5:06No one does. No, it's stuck in purgatory. Spec, you talk about the ducks and how they're going to be a force. And I do agree with you. I really like the makeup of their roster. Another team that is a force and has been a force, the hurricanes coming in here tonight. What are going to be some of the keys to having some success? And what are you looking for out of the game tonight? Well, they're always a good team. They're a really good regular season team. They're golden and let some down in the playoffs. They don't have quite what it takes somehow in the playoffs. Now, I guess you could say some of those years is because they run into Florida. And I think no one needs to hear that, you know, Carolina's not the only team around that couldn't handle Florida, right? Nobody could handle Florida. So, they've been a little bit in the wrong place, wrong time, I'd say, in Carolina. But, you know, I guess I want to say to you that, like Eric Tulski, like, they're one of these teams that's that's led by a really strong analytics GM.

6:07Great. And he's done a really good job. Awesome. Hasn't got him over the top. At some point, they got to go from being a good team to being not being the San Jose sharks of 15, you know, 12 years ago that were good, but not good enough. Yeah. Carolina's really good, man. They're really good. They've yet to be good enough. And at some point, that window's got to go one way or another, doesn't it, boys? Yeah. You know, with Carolina coming in today, it was kind of thinking about Taylor Hall last night's spec. When you look back, I mean, he's coming up on a thousand games. He was the face of the Otters franchise. You know, when they drafted a number number one overall, I was at that draft in LA. It was the Taylor Tyler thing. Remember sitting outside. You were probably there, spec. I can't remember when they had that little news conference right off the hop that availability outside where everyone was sitting out and they got a big deck somewhere. I can't even remember where it was. But I recall talking to Eric Goodbranson that day too. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, a really great career. You know, you want a heart trophy in New Jersey.

7:09But like, when you look at back at his career, and he's got still, he's got some runway left here. What do you think about when you think about Taylor Hall and his time here in the rest of his NHL career? Oh, come on. When you draft a guy first overall or no matter, forget it. I rescind that. When you draft a guy who anywhere who plays a thousand games, like, you've made a good draft pick and he's a good player. You don't play a thousand games as a bad player. You know, he was, he didn't have a prayer and Edmonton, right? Him and Ebson, Nude, come in here. They're kids. They hand the keys to the car over to a bunch of 20-year-olds. They got nothing around them. The management team is relatively clueless at that point. They were poor, right? Let's face it. Well, sure. The Edmonton's decade of darkness wasn't a planned rebuild, right? It was mostly screwing it up, you know? That's how we know the history tells us that. Yeah. So, Taylor Hall didn't have a prayer here. Like, he survived Edmonton. You know, had some fun like all kids should.

8:11I got all day for Taylor Hall. You know, he went on his way to other places. He did. He won a heart. He's been just a really good player for a really long time. He said, lots of health issues, knees, and things like that. You know, is he a perfect player? He's not a perfect player. Did he ever have the vision? Did he ever, like, the knock on Taylor Hall since he was 18, was kind of tunnel vision. Never saw the Isaac great. He's improved upon that a ton, but you know what? He's never going to be animals, right? Mr. Assist. Like, that's not his game. It never was his game. And don't ask that to be his game. He's a guy that comes up the wing at you, charging in, scoring from, you know, some distance with his wrist-shide, place hard. He was very fast in his day. I got all day for Taylor Hall, man. He's at a really good career. Hi, this is Pablo Tore from Pablo Tore finds out. And today, I want to talk to you about boost mobile. Because we spent a lot of time analyzing inefficiencies in sports, overvalued contracts, money tied up in the wrong places,

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10:12with a variety of 365 brand simmer sauces, rice and beans at wallet happy prices, liven things up in produce with fresh salsa and guacamole, saved during the Cocina Latina event at Whole Foods Market. Yeah, and you know, this year, this playoff run could be his best opportunity to get to a Stanley Cup final, just how things are shaken down in the East. How old would he be today? 34. I mean, to go. They're all 34. That's wild. So a little bit of wild. Yeah. Not good for him. Like, I feel like Carolina is deserving of a, you know, now that like the big bad wolf is out in the East. Right? Yeah, let's face it. Everyone's scared of Florida, because they got the secret sauce. Nobody can beat him. So now that they're old, there's a lot of teams, and the particularly Carolina would be one of them, looking around going, hey, you know what? It's wide open here. All the teams out west,

11:13like especially in the Pacific, it's wide open out here. You know, this has been an interesting year. There's, I feel like there's a lot of teams that think, you know what, if we can just get in, this is one of those years. It's not a, yeah, sure, we're going to get in, but there's six teams that are just juggernauts. It's not outlandish to say, expect that any one of the eight teams that make the playoffs in the Eastern Conference, it's not outlandish to say, hey, I got no problem with these, these guys getting to the Stanley Cup final, because they could. Yeah. You know, tap as a notch above, I'd say. Yeah. Tap as a notch above, that's fair. And they're going to meet, you know, let's say they, whoever they meet, they're going to run into a Montreal or a Buffalo. And even if those teams are good, they don't have much experience. So that's the one thing. Tap as a very experienced. They tap a big, tap a base bet could run into Detroit, the way the Buffalo Sabers are playing. Tap a good, finished second in the, in the Atlantic. Yeah, that's fair too. That's fair to say it's going to be fun.

12:14We love the playoffs. I'm really, like, I'm, I'm, I'm refreshed to see Detroit and Buffalo and Montreal. You know, those rebuilds now have turned the corner. Even layoff team hopefully this year, all three of them and probably in the, for the near future, they're all going to be playoff teams. Yeah, and sorry to cut you off their spec, but even like we're talking in the Anaheim out here, like it's good to see, it's good to see some fresh faces in the dance in the mix. Columbus could make a charge here. Yeah, Columbus. What spec? I mean, they could. There's not that much. Take again, you can look at tap a bay right now and they're tied with Buffalo. Been waiting 20 years for Columbus to make a charge, Kev. It's not outlandish to say spec. It's that's because there aren't the teams in the east that are so much better than the teams in the west, like we see with the teams in the center. I always say that every year. I just saw a board on TSN. They had five people on their panel and they all picked five teams to make a step

13:16to win the Stanley Cup. And for instance, the orders weren't any of the teams. So that's 25 picks, no orders. So that's fine. The orders haven't been that good, but my point is we get caught up every year in the flavor of the week, you know, whether it's Buffalo or whoever it is. And, you know, let's see what happens in playoff time, right? Let's, the teams, it's not very often that a team like the Oilers of O6 or the Flames of O4 happen. It's usually a good team that maybe didn't have a great regular season, but I'll tell you what, I fear Vegas a hell of a lot more than I'll ever fear Columbus, my friend. Well, sticking with the records. Sticking with the Oilers spec, who are we expecting to see in net tonight? I don't know, at some point you got to play Jari. I think that's like, I'm holding out. Maybe this is the hockey fan in me. I'm kind of holding out that, that Bowman's playing possum here on a goalie move. Really?

14:16Yeah. Right, I've just, you know what? I wouldn't be surprised if he's quietly behind the scenes trying to do something about his goaltening. Listen, he knows it's not good enough. He knows Jari hasn't put the big boy pants on here and played properly. Like, Jari has, I know the environment in front of him has been no good, but he hasn't delivered. Now, the Bowman knows that. Speck, did I hear a Freudian slip? Because as you said, Bowman, you said, Bob, are you talking, Bob Rosski? Speck, are you talking some move like that potentially could be made? I don't see Bob Rosski. I don't know, I'm not even sure who I see, frankly. I mean, I guess there's, the obvious one out there is Bennington, but I just feel like it's really, this is a wide open year. This is a year that, you know, look at the Pacific, right? You put the right team together. You can walk into that Western conference final. And once, if, if the orders could get to Western conference final, they'd be a formidable force

15:19if you got them some goaltening. So I'm just saying, the hockey fan in me is watching for that trade today. I'd love to see it. Well, Speck, Eddie's back and he's been really animated this morning. It's good to have the three of us kind of have a nice little chit chat here because it's been how's the studio smell with those eggs in it? Oh, that's awful. Like, I mean, it's so bad, Speck. You have no idea what it's like to be in here. Says the crop duster himself over there. You're the guy dropping silent, but deadly. Oh, yeah. Hey, you know what, we're not going to talk to you by till Monday, Speck. So in that time, it will be two games for the others. They will have played Caroline and tonight and then go to Vegas on Sunday. What do you, what do you think is, are we looking at three at a four point? Something what it would, what's a, what's a good couple of games here? Buddy, a good couple of games is keeping you're getting your goals, the games below four. Okay. You know, let's start with trying to win a game for three. How about that? That would be a good couple of games. Uh, I think that going into Vegas is a good thing.

16:23The orders play well in Vegas. They've, they've got a killer rivalry. Obviously it's a huge game. I think that, I think this road trip coupled with the deadline is, it's focused time for this order's roster. You know, if they come on from this trip and they haven't figured it out, I'm going to come on your show. You know, next Friday, and I'm going to say, I don't think they can figure it out. Yeah. This is the time and the place. And the, and the opportunity for this thing to come together. There's lots of time left. I know we've all waited a long time. There's lots of time left. They got their new players. They got focused games against Vegas, Denver, Dallas. It's signed to start laying down a proper game of hockey. I think that will happen. It's back. Good stuff as always. We'll see you down at three. Sounds good, Kev. Knock knock. Oh, who's there? A boost mobile expert here to deliver and set up your all-new iPhone 17 Pro designed to be the most powerful iPhone ever.

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