A plea to the NHL from a playoff purist

To say I am a purist about playoff structure would be an understatement.

I’m sympathetic to how leagues envision regular-season formats and trying to strike the perfect balance between entertainment value, competition, and maximizing operating margins.

The playoffs, however, are a different animal. I have been at TSN for nine years now and I doubt there has been a topic I’ve railed harder against than the league’s current playoff format and qualification system.

While I’m sympathetic to some of the challenges the league faces (logistics, arena availabilities, and regular-season scheduling imbalance – more on this in a minute), it shouldn’t marginalize or negate a league’s need for competitive fairness when the games matter most.

Reward the teams that dominate your regular season. Create a format and structure that puts fans in seats, eyeballs on televisions, and works towards the type of best-versus-best format we want deep in the postseason.

The NHL is missing the mark here, owing in large part to an obsession with creating divisional-based playoff formats where teams must first advance out of their division before entering the conference championships. Because the NHL relies on a divisional format, the structure underpinning it creates a mess of inefficiency – not only are there two floating wild-card teams in each conference, but the second and third seeds in each division must play each other in the opening round.

The forced two-versus-three series is guaranteed to deliver favourable or unfavourable matchups for as long as a talent imbalance across divisions exists. We have seen this play out for a number of years now. Consider some of these first-round matchups since the format changed:

This is just a quick sampling but look not just at the quality of the two seeds in these divisions (averaging 112 points, which tends to be on the outside of Presidents’ Trophy contention) and the quality of their first-round opponents on the road. Some of these teams would have won other divisions outright in their respective seasons. Instead, the NHL throws them into a first-round gauntlet.
And because playoff formats are zero-sum, the assembly of elite matchups like this means weak opening-round series elsewhere. Last season provided perhaps the greatest example yet. Tampa Bay (110 points) and St. Louis (109 points) had to play on the road against two elite teams – the 115-point Toronto Maple Leafs and the 113-point Minnesota Wild –  while the Edmonton Oilers (104 points) hosted a home playoff round against the Los Angeles Kings (99 points). There is simply nothing good nor fair about that.

Let’s translate that back to this season. Again, to make this format work, you require talent balance across conferences and divisions, reasonably speaking. In the case of this year, the talent imbalance exists at the conference level, with more high-end teams in the East and more minnows in the West.

Here’s what we are pacing towards this year:

You can see which teams are going to get squeezed this year: the Lightning and Maple Leafs, who were in a similar spot just one season ago. It’s remarkable to me that one of these two teams – both of whom are pacing for 110 points by season end – will likely finish in the top five of the NHL standings and open the postseason on the road. Meanwhile, every single seed in the West is pacing for an equivalent or fewer number of points, and will have an easier opponent in most circumstances.

I want to address the scheduling imbalance piece. Supporters of the current format will point out that these teams do not play a perfectly balanced schedule, meaning quality of competition over the aggregate is different for teams. While that is true, I’m going to show you why it’s mostly bunk, and why it shouldn’t play a primary role in deciding postseason matchups.

Consider both the Lightning and Maple Leafs, headed towards another doomsday matchup in a few months. Let’s look at how they have accumulated those point totals by breaking it out by division:

In every scenario, Tampa Bay and Toronto are playing against playoff paces (and in most cases, elite-level playoff paces) irrespective of the type of their opponent.

This isn’t a story about the Lightning and Maple Leafs getting fat against Atlantic Division foes – it’s a story about them pummeling the Central Division into oblivion and faring quite well against the Metro Division as well. Their reward will likely be facing one another come April.

There are varying opinions on what format the NHL should use. I’d love for the league to break all boundaries and create a one-versus-16 format that’s even blind to conferences; considering the logistical challenges that may ensue, straight one-versus-eight seeding by conference may be the right note to strike.

But forcing two and three seeds within a division to play each other in the opening round must end. The only thing these matchups do is serve to create arbitrarily easier paths for some teams and harder paths for others.

That’s not the spirit of playoff hockey.

Data via Natural Stat Trick, NHL.com, Evolving Hockey, Hockey Reference