Welcome back to Some Schmuck Whines about Hockey, with your host, Some Schmuck. I posted some on Tuesday about how the geographic realignment isn't so bad and some on Friday about how the loss of rivalries is heartbreaking.
While the loss of these rivalries is the real loss for me, there are other issues that come out of the playoff format in the new 4-conference plan. Currently, the top team in each division makes the playoffs, accounting for 3 of the 8 playoff spots in each conference. The remaining 12 teams in the conference are then ranked, and the top 5 of those make the playoffs as well. These 8 teams then playoff until a champion is crowned, and the two conference champions face each other in the Stanley Cup Finals.
Under the new system, a 7- or 8-team conference will get 4 playoff spots, assigned to its top 4 teams. Each conference will then playoff to find a champion, and then the 4 conference champions will somehow playoff to determine the winner of the Stanley Cup. This is problematic for two reasons: playoff berths and playoff brackets.
On the subject of berths, first of all, each conference gets 4 spots, but some have more teams than others. All things being equal, a team in an 8-team conference has a 7.14% worse chance of making the playoffs than a team in a 7-team conference. That's not insignificant.
And then there's the whole who-goes-with-whom issue. As in any sport, with any league structure, some divisions are going to be stronger than others. Teams in stronger divisions must play more games against stronger teams, and must inherently be a little stronger to survive than those in weaker divisions: that's just the nature of the beast.
But with the new conference structure, it's worse than that. Playoff berths are assigned to each conference equally. So not only will teams in stronger conferences have to play more games against stronger teams, they also have to compete for the same number of playoff spots against those stronger teams. The new system inherently increases the likelihood that a better team will miss the playoffs while a worse team makes them.
In fact, looking back, each season since the lockout, there is at least one team that made the playoffs based on its overall point total, which would not have made the playoffs under this new configuration, because it is in the wrong "conference." This includes the 2008-2009 Hurricanes, for example, who won the #6 seed in the East before making it to the Conference Finals.
Beyond who makes the playoffs, concentrated talent in specific conferences has negative effects on the ultimate playoff structure, as well. Since each of the four conferences will likely have to crown a champion prior to any inter-conference playoff play, if the best teams are concentrated in the same conference, all but one will be eliminated in the first two rounds, leaving the Conference Finals and Finals to be potentially anticlimactic.
Yes, this is already true in part. The East and West each crown a champion, and those two play in the Finals, even if the two best teams in the league were in the same conference. But by doubling the number of conferences, the NHL has exacerbated this issue quite a bit.
Why not just take these things you're calling conferences, call them divisions, and pair them naturally into an Eastern and Western Conference? Then determine playoff berth based on conference (after taking the two division winners), and have more intra-conference games than inter-conference games. The answer, of course, is that small market hockey has won the day here.
Let's say you're a generic, mediocre, small-market team. You have some teams you play more often than others, but you don't really have any long-standing bad blood with anyone. All your fans, though, have heard of Sidney Crosby. You will sell more tickets when the big stars come to town. It is beneficial for you to force every team to have a home-and-home against every other team.
You're also pretty happy about the new playoff structure. You're mediocre, so you're not super-likely to get into the playoffs each season. But with this added element of more mediocre teams getting in at the loss of better teams, you're more likely to get in. And, having gotten in, your playoffs start out among your weaker division as well, so you're more likely to go deeper, and to sell more tickets.
So, small-market hockey wins, actually-profitable-teams lose. Does this work out? We'll see. If five years from now, the number of profitable NHL teams has increased significantly, then color me wrong. The loss of old historical NHL rivalries has made way for an era of successful teams across the continent. But Gary Bettman has never done anything to prove that he wants to drive teams' bottom lines - just the NHL's bottom line. And my instinct is that this will decrease the success of the successful teams without increasing any other team's.
One more note: While I've kept these complaints fairly generic, I am aware that this is worse for us as Ranger fans than it is for other fans. On the rivalry front, the Rangers are the only Original Six team not in a conference with any others (the Bruins remain with the Canadiens and Leafs, and the Blackhawks remain with the Red Wings). So while many teams will lose some existing relationships, the Rangers will lose the most storied ones.
And of course, the strength of our new conference. Holy shit. In the Penguins, Flyers, and, somehow, Rangers, the current Atlantic Division already contains three of the top five teams in the entire NHL. Now we're going to take that division and add the Washington Capitals. And that resulting conference will be assigned only four playoff spots, and only one spot in the final two rounds. Much like the late 70s, the next few years might see a truly great Ranger team never win big because it got good at the same time as other teams. But just maybe that's too much speculation.
Anyway. Three posts is probably plenty of talk about realignment. It's a decent (but not perfect) geographic segmentation, but the 4-conference structure seems like it's gonna be really painful to me. And the Rangers, I think, get more screwed than most (in fact, reports are that Sather was one of the only 4 GMs to vote against this realignment plan). But hey - Ranger fan in Dallas - you'll get to see your Blueshirts once a season, guaranteed!
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