All 32 NHL teams should be in the Stanley Cup playoffs — it is the Wright way to celebrate hockey's chaotic heart
Leaning into chaos might embiggen the NHL regular season and end tanking for the draft lottery. Also, thoughts on Doug Ford conceding that Justin Trudeau is premier of Ontario, and on Albert Pujols.
The National Hockey League hardly deserves this treat after its behaviour this week (for more on that, open Twitter in a fresh browser tab). But recent happenings make right now the second-best time to proposing allowing all 32 teams into the Stanley Cup playoffs once the Seattle Kraken begin play next season. The second-best time was any point since Seattle became the 32nd franchise.
Going to an All 32 is a way for the NHL to show how hockey is actually different, as the #pleaselikemysport crowd claims. The league can also be ahead the trend lines across Major League Baseball, the NBA and NFL. The other three leagues are all using the pandemic as an excuse to add unworthies to the playoffs, and soon all four will have 32 teams. Hockey can actually do it since it can do chaos well, instead of its usual application where it does nothing while players from rival big-market U.S. teams have a line brawl one second after the opening faceoff.
The NFL, the only other league that currently has 32 teams, could not sell the public on a 32-team Super Bowl tournament as long as the New York Jets exist. Baseball is a ways away from completing the massive cash grab from adding two more franchises, but its players association is wise to ‘expanded playoffs’ being code for wanting to make it possible for low-budget teams with losing records to have a shot at a wild-card berth. The two NBA Finals teams are almost always top-three seeds within their conferences.
The NHL regular season has always been foreplay. It makes sense to pare to a 70- to 74-game skeddie to clear space for another tier of‘first to four wins’* series. It would have something for everyone: more games that the players and the public will feel invested in. The promoter-proprietors of teams would probably catch something on the back end since NHL players are only on salary during the regular season. It would also offer something new to the league’s U.S. media partners at Turner and ESPN.
This season of pandemic hockey has pointed out that the 16-team format, which has been around in various forms since 1980, can lend itself to anticlimax. Having a staggered finish to the regular season has not helped, but there is little sense of any edge-of-the-seat tension over who is in and who will be watching the playoffs. Only one division has less than a five-point gap between the team in the final playoff position, and the fifth-place team to get in so their Canadian players can avoid having to find the latest meme-y way to ignore an invitation from Hockey Canada about playing in the world men’s championship in Latvia.
But wait, wouldn’t letting every team in the playoffs mean even less tension about the second season, since everyone is guaranteed of their participation ribbon?
That is possible, but the trade-offs are greater. There will be leverage for the teams that finish in the top half of the overall standings, some creative chaos in how the teams are seeded from No. 1 to No. 32 in a March Madness type bracket. Thirdly, this will attempt to end teams tanking to secure better odds in a draft lottery. That is also topical after in the wake of everyone’s No. 1 pick in 2022, Shane Wright, and the 1A and 1B players for Tankfest 2023, Connor Bedard and Matvei Michkov, ripping up the world under-18 championship. They deserve better than going to the 31st or 32nd overall team, and those teams do not deserve them.
The top 16 teams, and the NHL can decide whether that should be split up per conference, division or region, will get some credit for their regular-season results. In both Japanese and Korean baseball, top teams are automatically awarded a 1-0 series lead in the playoffs. For the first round, a certain number of higher-seeded would start with the 1-0 lead. The hockey knowers can decide whether that entitlement should be given to the top four, eight or 12 seeds. It seems a bit much to give it to the team with home-ice advantage in the 17 vs. 16 matchup.
The automatic 1-0 lead should also carry over into four of the eight series in the Round of 16 (the new second round, which used to be the first round). Hockey Twitter can fight over whether that spoil would be determined by regular-season record or to the winners of the 32 vs. 1, 31 vs. 2, 30 vs. 3 or 29 vs. 4 series. The latter means it is possible that the current interation(s) of Anaheim and/or Detroit start a series up 1-0 after upsetting Vegas or Tampa Bay despite starting in an 0-1 hole. (Those would be actual matchups in an All 32 that was based on the overall standings, but we are not going to do it that way.)
So there is incentive for top teams, and more rest time between rounds since a team could actually sweep’em in three. This builds in potential for players to stay fresher later into the playoffs.
This brings it to the best part.
The teams would not be seeded in strict order of point percentage. Sports runs on perpetual arguments. The NHL could take a point from America’s shamateurism-industrial complex’s golden goose, the men’s Division 1 basketball tournament, and hold a ‘Stanley Cup Selection Show’ on a weeknight after the end of the regular season. Then it could give the teams a week to practise and prep before starting the playoffs properly on a weekend.
The top 16 teams will be in the top half of the draw. One selection committee, which ideally would consist of a combination of traditional and data-minded analysts and professional scouts from the 16 teams not under discussion, would have to privately discuss the 1 through 16 seeds.
For a clearer picture, imagine the teams who would be in the top group. Seattle can be thrown in as a league-average team. The league-average point percentage at this writing is .538, which is also the Montréal Canadiens’ point percentage. Congratulations, Habs, for being both the median and the mean in the current standings. You are helping children learn math through being the NHL standings’ equivalent of the grocery stick.
Combien de saisons restantes sur le contrat de Carey Price? Mon dieu.
The first group would have to slot the top 16 teams (listed in order of record through May 6):
Carolina, Vegas, Colorado, Toronto, Florida, Washington, Minnesota, Pittsburgh, Boston, Edmonton, New York Islanders, Winnipeg, Nashville, St. Louis, Montréal.
Simultaneously, another call takes place where another committee with matching expertise determines the 17 through 32 seeds. That group consists of:
Seattle, Dallas, New York Rangers, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, Arizona, Calgary, San Jose, Vancouver, Ottawa, Columbus, New Jersey, Detroit, Anaheim, Buffalo.
I did not have the heart to put Imaginary Seattle in the first group and Montréal in the second. The Canadiens have the worst five-on-five goals-for percentage in the league over the last month by nearly four points, but they can probably beat a team that has no players. Maybe not by a lot, but a little.
The stat nerds and scouts will have to hammer out seeding that factors for strength of schedule, teams’ form over the last 15 to 20 regular-season games and player health. Who seems to be peaking at the right time? Who has adjusted the best since losing a top-six forward when he was carried away by cicadas on that east coast road trip?. Some conditions could be built in; maybe a team will need a top-six overall record to get 1 through 4 seeds, top 12 to be seeded between 5 and 8, and so forth.
Phil from Marketing — fuckin’ guy! — would likely want to offer input on how to further adjust the Round of 32 to create matchups based on historic rivalries. For instance, Edmonton is 11th overall and Calgary is 23rd. They could be bumped into the 21 vs. 12 matchup, just for the rush of a Battle of Alberta matchup. It is supposed to be entertainment, after all.
The speculation — picture all the reporters digging to try to get scoops on seeding — would build anticipation for the Stanley Cup Selection Show.
The one loose end is how this would address tanking. The teams that finished between 17 and 32 would receive their draft slot — or bonus money allocation if the NHL abolishes the entry draft — based on their late season results. This could be called the D.J. Smith rule, after the coach of the Ottawa Senators.
Both Ottawa and Calgary have, in the current setup, been screwing up their draft position by playing hockey competently. They have been the second- and third-best teams in the all-Canadian division over the past 30 days, even though neither is graced by Connor McDavid. Putting those types of teams in the playoffs means that draft position can be earned instead of given by the bounce of a ping-pong ball.
So Wright, or Bedard, or Michnov, can draw in to a team that is closer to the Stanley Cup than a teamthat finished 31st or 32nd overall and went out four straight — three straight — in the first round. They will never appear on Sportsnet wearing the someone-painted-my-cat-and-stole-my-bike expression 18-year-old McDavid sported after Edmonton won the draft lottery in 2015.
Ottawa is a hungry young team — and with Eugene Melnyk’s financials, there’s always a non-zero chance they actually are playing for a sandwich — that would relish the opportunity to upend a top team and move up the draft board.
Think of 1981, when the 14th-seeded Oilers swept the third-seeded Canadiens 3-0 in the last non-pandemic postseason that employed a straight 1-to-16 seeding. Wayne Gretzky, Paul Coffey, Jari Kurri and Mark Messier were future hockey hall of famers who were all still junior hockey-aged, and they took down the Canadiens who were just two years removed from winning the Cup. This was so exciting for the NHL that it promptly realigned the divisions and changed the playoff format to prevent it from happening again.
The Senators of 2021 likely do not have the same ceiling as the Oilers of 1981. But getting experience in a playoff environment is much better service to selling hope than the bounce of ping-pong balls, especially if there was incentive to add a generational talent.
There are always unintended consequences with an idea that will probably lead half of the readership to wonder if the writer was smoking Kraken before they wrote it. But hockey is all about finding an order, however emphemerally, in the chaos of the game’s randomness. This would do much more to make the game’s better qualities more of a feature than a bug.
It would be just as well to retire the draft lottery. No NHL team is ever going to top the draft lottery reaction video that the Ontario league’s Oshawa Generals dropped this week, after getting the second pick.
The Ontario PCs’ blatant bigotry deserves more than the maximum fine allowable under the CBA. But first, Gary Bettman.
If only one could buy stock in authoritarian bullshit. Both NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and Ontario’s government for the property developers have spread plenty of that of this week, and the week is not yet over.
Taking Bettman first. The New York Rangers said, ‘Hey, we think the league fumbled the discipline on Washington’s Tom Wilson when he only got the ‘maximum fine allowable under the CBA’ for deliberately trying to injure Pavel Buchnevich and Artemi Panarin.” Bettman said, “Screw you; now you’re fined 50 times as much as Tom Wilson.”
That shows the Rangers who is in charge! Meantime, you should see if sports books are offering odds on how much longer George Parros will be the NHL’s vice president of player safety.
Why does everything have to be so political?
The Ontario Progressive Conservatives, our RepubliCons, have abandoned any pretense of governing during the worst civil emergency in the Ontario’s 237-year history. There is still a province to govern. And the RepubliCons want to beat it into the heads of, oh, 38 to 42 per cent of the electorate that the federal Liberals and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are not doing a good enough job of running Ontario.
The Big Lie, set to racist dog-whistling, is that foreign visitors, including students whose international tuition fees keep the lights on at many Ontario universities, are is to blame for COVID-19 variants entering Ontario. It is a tasteless and tacky other-ing that is built on fiction and feelings. Fact: Canada’s borders have been closed to non-essential travel for almost 14 months.
That there-is-no-bottom tack was evident before the Ontario RepubliCons started running “attack ads (that) depict planes landing at Pearson International Airport and a red stain of infection spreading across the province.” (Red is the Liberals’ colour, in case the coding was too subtle.)
The white-male-privilege move of calling this desperate and sad minimizes the danger that it poses. Other-ing an out-group is never okay, and it is especially gross while anti-Asian hate crimes are increasing in North America.
There is no shaming the shameless usual suspects such as political operatives Nick Kouvalis and Kory Teneycke; one can only hope to vote out their bosses in 2022. (At least Kouvalis squeezed in some international travel during a pandemic before advising the premier to beat the disinformation drum about international travel during a pandemic.)
It is base-level disturbing any time an incumbent party in Canada shifts into campaign mode more than a year before the election date. It cuts uncomfortably close to the American political cycle. This is well above the usual replacement-level idiocy and insidiousness of politics, but it is part of how that party rallies its base. To apply a line that Charles Pierce wrote about their American analog, “the ultimate test of your partisan loyalty is the depth of your allegiance to a fantasy.”
Blaming Ontario’s third wave of COVID19 on Trudeau for not using magical and/or likely unconstitutional powers to control some a vaguely racialized Other is a fantasy. The grey-tinged truth about borders and variants, as epidemiologist Dr. Colin Furness told Aaron Wherry of the CBC, is that “Trudeau… may have drilled a few small holes in the bottom — but Ford is pouring even more water in.”
The Ontario PCs only started caring about borders and travel once they realized they needed to play desperation hockey. By word and inaction, they have shown that they do not care about the border issue.
This might not even be the saddest gaslighting attempt of the week in ONTerrible politics The long-term care minister this week had the gall to blame her department’s pandemic mismanagement on the New Democrats, who were neither the government nor the official opposition at any point between 1995 and 2018 when long-term care was widely deregulated, with Conservatives cashing in big-time. No fewer than 14 RepubliCons have a stake in industrialized long-term care.
About two weeks ago, I pointed out that Ontarians were information-poor in terms of knowing what the province’s ceiling is for daily vaccinations. The CBC just did the math. Its estimate is that Ontario could give “373,000 doses per day,” but the average in recent days is 97,200.
That works out to .261 when expressed in baseball-style percentage. That is only .011 points higher than Albert Pujols’ on-base percentage before he was designated for assignment by Los Angeles Angels on Thursday.
Pujols in perspective
Think of the he’s-finally-arrived excitement about the Blue Jays’ Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who is slashing .465 / .592 after 30 games his age-22, which is third season in the big leagues.
That approximates what Albert Pujols did across his entire first decade in the majors, after arriving in the majors at 21 with considerably less hoopla. Pujols slashed .426 / .624 over his first 10 seasons, and he was a presence who was a polished glove man at first base and even had some years where he was a shrewd base-stealer.
Major League Baseball’s variant of stepondickitis, where two legs of the batting Triple Crown are irrelevant early 20th-century stats, actually cost Pujols and fans a Triple Crown in 2009. The Triple Crown should be based on leading a league in home runs, runs scored and on-base percentage (OBP).
Pujols could not win an OBP title during his first seven seasons since Barry Bonds was still playing. Bonds was ghosted after the 2007 season, when he passed Henry Aaron for the most career home runs. That gave Pujols the window to win an OBP title. He promptly OBed a .462 in 2008, which would be his career best — but was second to Chipper Jones’s .470. (Jones had about 165 fewer plate appearances.) Some weirdo Canadian named Joey Votto who preferred getting bases on balls to taking undisciplined swings to try drive in runs had come on the scene, so ’09 was now or never for Pujols win the OBP title.
Pujols led the National League at .443 and won the home run and runs scored titles. He got all the love that deserved with a third most valuable player award, but the game was created since it was not acknowledged as a Triple Crown.
By no means is that meant to fade Miguel Cabrera’s Triple Crown season for Detroit in 2012, which remains the only one in the last half-century. That is also canon. But tradition has to evolve.
Pujols and Jeff Bagwell are probably the only long-term successful first basemen in the last 3½ decades whom one could call a five-tool player without breaking character. And Pujols has 20-per-cent more Wins Above Replacement than Bagwell, even with his long plateau in Los Angeles.
That is more than enough for today. Please stay safe, and be kind.