Apparently, Newsweek all-sports beat writer Tyler Erzberger doesn't like the NHL playoff format very much.
He castigates it in this piece, in which he reveals himself as not being a big fan of division rivalries either (guess he likes the NBA playoff format — where a team can win their division and still not make the playoffs — a lot more).
To prove what appears to be his point, Erzberger uses "seeds" that don't exist in the NHL, since the league admittedly uses a confusing hybrid format to determine postseason matchups, with the "wild card" teams always playing the first-place teams in their own conference in the first round; i.e., the worse of the two wild cards playing the better of the two division winners in their own conference, with the better of the two wild cards getting to take on the worse of the two first-place teams. The second-place teams always play the third-place teams from the same division in the first round.
Does Erzberger believe that nothing has changed in 40 years, when statistics showed that empty-bench brawls were more likely to occur in same-division games? Not only that, but the NHL's 80-game regular-season schedule in that era had teams from the same division playing each other eight times every year (except in the six-team Patrick Division, where they faced off seven times annually), with all non-division opponents, whether within the same conference or not, having three meetings each (and let's keep the NBA's 2004 "Malice at the Palace" in the rear-view mirror, where it belongs).
By contrast, in hockey today, all teams not in the same conference play each other twice every season, with teams in different divisions of the same conference meeting three times and division rivals playing each other either three or four times, meaning far fewer intra-division games than in the 1980s — within each division, a team plays five of their seven division rivals four times and the other two three times.
And the NHL has already announced that its regular-season schedule will be increased to 84 games effective next season (the NBA can do this too — and the ABA played an 84-game schedule throughout its existence — except in its first two seasons, when it played 78).
Another thing that the NHL can and should do is go back to its days of having a high percentage of teams qualifying for the playoffs. Throughout the storied "Original Six" era, four teams continued on to the playoffs — and no one ever kvetched about it; but by the early 1970s, only half of the league's teams (8 out of 16) made it, a trend that then underwent a complete reversal, in that by the early '80s, 16 out of 21 teams were getting in.
Since then, however, the number of postseason qualifiers has remained frozen at 16, even though 11 new teams have been added to the NHL, with even more possibly on the way.
Because NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has gone on record as being opposed to the implementation of an NBA-style "play-in," the obvious alternative is an expansion of the playoff field from the current 16 teams to 20 (which has been debated previously) — and given Bettman's liking of Mike Tomlin's "division purism," the new format can have the top five teams in each division make the playoffs, to begin, in each division, with the fourth-place team hosting the fifth-place team in a best-of-three "mini-series," something the NHL itself did from 1974-75 through 1978-79 — and if a sixth-place team in one division finishes with a better record than a fifth-place team in another division? T.S. — and that doesn't stand for tennis shoes! Plus, this will get rid of any confusion over which teams make the playoffs and which teams don't (one of the biggest problems in the NBA).
And hockey fights have decreased by more than half over the past four decades — a trend that is apparently not being reversed by the Bettman-implemented increased emphasis on same-division games, particularly in the playoffs.
But the Tyler Erzbergers of this world will always find something to complain about.
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