Are you ready? KAC? Here it comes Wednesday night, PNC Arena, Ottawa Senators and the season opener of the 23 24 season. And for the first time in their history with the Stanley Cup under their belt and another appearance in the Stanley Cup finals under their belt. The Carolina Hurricanes are the betting favorites. That's right. Vegas has Carolina as the betting favorites. Think about this. They have the second best record in the entire NHL a year ago, third best record in the NHL the year before that heck, they were the third best team in the league, the pandemic crazy year. So they have been building towards this and maybe that's why the front office felt like we might wanna just run it back with pretty much the same group and they really did apart from three alterations in the lineup on defense, Dmitry Orlov comes in was with Washington for most of his career, finished the year in Boston last year and now is with Carolina. He's Dynamite. He's really a top pair defenseman, but he will play on a third pair and he'll probably start the season with Tony d'angelo. That's right. O our old friend Tony is back to help out the power play create some more offense, maybe a little more attitude and forward, Michael Bunting, who spent the last couple of years playing alongside Austin Matthews with the Toronto Maple Leafs 23 goals in each of the last two season. He'll likely play with Sebastian Aho on Carolina's top line. The one big question going into Wednesday will Andrei Svet be in the lineup, tore his AC L with 18 games to play, missed out in the postseason, obviously, and they need him and they also need the best of him if they can get that. Carolina is a completely different offensive team. Couple of other things that are worth pointing out one, what version of Tavo terrain is Carolina likely to get, remember, it was his worst full season in the NHL last year since signing his contract with Carolina like five years ago, six years ago, he's basically been about 70 to 75 points per year last year. It's around 40 not good. Seth Jarvis should be better than he was last year and he was an improved player over the previous year, but his offensive numbers were down. I think those numbers come up and Martin Naches, once Sveshnikov got hurt, Naches production really fell off and he was almost non-existent apart from one great game against the Devils in the postseason. If they get that version, a better version of Marty Natures to go along with Andre and Seth and Tavo Tavan, the offense is not going to be a problem. And here's a prediction, Brent Burns has a better year this year than he had last year when he had a Hurricanes record for defenseman, 61 points. We'll see it all when it starts on Wednesday.