If the Stanley Cup playoffs were seeded like March Madness, with all 32 teams; or the Leafs are too high, and so are you
It is an NHL playoff preview unlike any other, with a seeded 32-team bracket in an NHL universe where it understands hoopla and closes the salary-cap loopholes that Tampa Bay exploits so well.
Hockey fans are only happy when they complain; they’re only happy when it’s complicated. One of the culture’s contradictions is how the endless beef with how the closed circle of 150 or so people who run the sport are running the sport is pushed aside to close ranks when presented with an idea that is intended to create more of the good stuff. So maybe letting everyone into the playoffs is more of a Shelbyville idea.
The big idea, of course, is to pare the regular season so all 32 teams can participate in the playoffs. Participation ribbons FTW; suck it, Boomer Uncles! It would engage more fans and build incentives for stragglers to compete instead of lahde-dahdiing their way to the draft lottery. So, as a bonus, this plan protects top-of-the-draft-class phenoms from ending up in Buffalo and having a Jack Eichel career arc.
Playoff and short-tournament hockey are, thanks for the pro tip, better than the bite of banality that is the regular season. It is true at every strata of the sport where the regular-season competition is longer than 30 games. The pecking order in the NHL is usually set by the American Thanksgiving weekend when the league is on a standard schedule. The 16 teams in playoff position at that stage almost always end up in the playoffs, give or take a glorious exception like the 2019 St. Louis Blues. And they still have another 4½ months until the playoffs. And people call baseball pointless.
The morning of March 15 was the rough midpoint of the 56-game pandemic regular season if you believe the regular season is over once playoff series begin. At that date, 15 out of the 16 playoff teams were in playoff position. The Nashville Predators are the shining exception, since they came from last place in the Central quadrant to win fourth place by playing .732 hockey since to earn a playoff berth. Chicago was the only team to drop out; the Hawks took the .407.
The regular season is a largely redundant grind. Expanding the postseason to 32 teams, with the top eight seeds being spotted a 1-0 lead against the Nos. 25 to 32 seeds, is not meant to change the likely unchangeable. It just accepts it and attaches a reward to a higher finish. Teams in the lower 16 would be into the playoffs to determine the draft order.
It is meant to effect a change in behaviour. Hey, just like carbon rebates!
It feels like that is enough reintroduction of an idea that might only sound good to someone sitting at home in an apartment building with a COVID19 outbreak. The only other twist is that, instead of going by straight record, the NHL’s reimagined playoffs would involve a Selection Show. In the best tradition of the league under commissioner Gary Bettman, it would take something from another sport and pass it off as their own.
So, yes, to demonstrate how this would work, I seeded the 31 teams and the Imaginary Seattle Kraken from No. 1 to 32. Let’s imagine the Canada-United States border is open to allow for an at-large seeding. This was very eyeballed. The consults are MoneyPuck’s power ranking, the overall standings, the team records since the April 12 trade deadline and Natural Stat Trick’s rankings of five-on-five play. The non-playoff Dallas Stars and New York Rangers are in the top 16 since their matching .536 point percentages beat the Montréal Canadiens’ .527.
Colorado Region
No. 32 Vancouver vs. No. 1 Colorado; No. 17 Seattle vs. No. 16 Winnipeg
A pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good Throwback Jersey Pod. Break out your Canucks Flying V, Québec Nordiques baby-blue, Seattle Metropolitans concept jersey and Atlanta Thrashers jersey, since the Jets used to be the Thrashers.
Colorado won the President’s Trophy, and Nathan MacKinnon, et al., led the NHL in regulation wins and goals.
Vancouver, of course, should have had its season called off after damn near the entire team contracted the P. 1 variant of coronavirus. The Canucks have been the NHL’s third-worst five-on-five team since un-pausing their season, and are ranked last by MoneyPuck. I am already dreading how, 10 or 20 years from now, the media will valourize the Canucks playing out the string during a pandemic. I am fully aware of the irony of using a sports newsletter to point out it is socially irresponsible for sports to foster a false sense of normalcy during a pandemic that is still months away from ending, but there is no getting away from acknowledging that truth.
Seattle-Winnipeg? Did the Jets not already get enough of losing to a first-year team against Vegas in 2018? In the wild, the Kraken only have one player, free agent signing Luke Henman, which I imagine would make him a hot pick in hockey pool drafts. At this point, a team formed through a Making The Cut reality-show competition and one-week training camp would probably be more on the same page than the Jets have been at any point since April 15. The Jets have had the worst record in the league over the last month, which is saying a lot if you remember that paragraph about Vancouver.
Kicker: both teams managed to defeat Toronto twice in that span.
No. 25 Arizona vs. No. 8 Washington; No. 24 Detroit vs. No. 9 Boston
You need that extra week to 10 days of stocking up on Costco popcorn before the mutually assured destruction between the Capitals and Bruins. Did you know Zdeno Chara played for Boston for, like, a really long time? And do you remember when Washington wing Tom Wilson tried to kill a guy earlier this season? No, not those times; the first time, when he actually was suspended for a blow to the head of Boston’s Brandon Carlo.
Florida Region
No. 29 Chicago vs. No. 4 Florida; No. 20 Ottawa vs. No. 13 Minnesota
Florida slips into the 4 seed by dint of having the best post trade-deadline record. Jonathan Huberdeau has a window of opportunity to lead a playoff run before the franchise moves to Québec and he has to endure the fishbowl existence of a francophone hockey player that has ruined more young Canadiens players than Rue Ste-Catherine.
Minnesota and Ottawa are 10th and 12th in overall record since March 15, so it’s the close matchup you have always associated with the 20 vs. 13 matchup. Over that span, they rank 20th and 21st in five-on-five xGF%. One team is going to find out that living on the margins and being well-coached only goes so far, and the collapse will be swift and sudden.
No. 28 Anaheim vs. No. 5 Carolina; No. 21 Montreal vs. No. 12 Dallas
The Hurricanes, who were third in the final standings, have been plateaued since the deadline. Taking the two-spot drop to the No. 5 seed. Carolina would get their shot at Florida in the quarterfinals.
Dallas is the best team that is in the playoffs, and Montréal is the worst team in the playoffs. That they ended up matched was a total coincidence.
Toronto Region
No. 31 Buffalo vs. No. 2 Toronto; No. 18 New York Rangers vs. No. 15 St. Louis
A 2-seed for Toronto is the Mississauga compromise of seedings. Rageahol for the Leafs haters, fuel for endless do the Leafs deserve to be this high? prattle for every hockey yakker on every hockey-yakking platform, and enough to feed narratives that the Leafs face doubters.
Hey, MoneyPuck considers Toronto the second-best team in the league. Natural Stat Trick ranks them second in expected goals-for pct. And third in goals-for pct. since mid-March. A seeding is as much about hype and projections as past performance, and Toronto being second would be essential for the Canadian audience since, you know this one, the Leafs always matter.
Starting them off against the Buffalo Sabres just puts a stick in Leaf Nation’s side to let ’em know the hockey gods are there. It fits in with Leafs fans forever bracing for how it is gonna go wrong this time. The Leafs almost never win away games in Buffalo. Everyone would take a run at a joke about how the league gave top seeds an automatic 1-0 lead just to make sure Toronto would not be swept 4-0 after Auston Matthews’ dominant regular season. And every Leafs fan would know that the team has won only 12 of 41 games in Buffalo since the salary cap era began in 2005, since the media would tell them over and over.
A Rangers-Blues series would be interesting since the Rangers fired everyone at the end of the regular season. Would they have done so if they had known they would be in the playoffs? Probably, since this is J.D. Dolan.
No. 26 San Jose vs No. 7 Pittsburgh; No. 23 Los Angeles vs. No. 10 Edmonton
The possibility of a Sidney Crosby vs. Connor McDavid showdown would be on tap in the second round, with the winner moving on to meet Matthews and Mitch Marner. Can you dig it? This would be better than Crosby and Alex Ovechkin meeting in a Metropolitan Division matchup seemingly every season, while smug American hockey writers make Ovechkin out to be the good guy and portray Crosby as the heel. It should be the other way around. Crosby has not punched an opponent in the groin in at least four years and he is promoting hockey access for “Black youth, female Indigenous players, and for new Canadians.” Meantime, Ovechkin is buddy-buddy with Vladimir Putin, and his personal protector Wilson assaulted the Rangers’ Artemi Panarin, the only prominent Russian athlete who publicly criticizes Putin.
A San Jose-Pittsburgh matchup would be a rematch of the 2016 Stanley Cup final. Requiring the Penguins to only win three games to bounce San Jose is a random act of kindness to Sharks fans, who scarcely need any bitter reminder of faded almost glory, or that there are teams such as the Penguins who manage to overcome years on end of adverse draft position. Los Tiburones were graced by inner-circle talents such as Joe Thornton and Brent Burns and never won a Cup with them, and now 18-year general manager Doug Wilson is refusing to rebuild and is talking about just needing to tweak team culture, like that has nothing to do with the fellow who has had his job since 2003. That fellow’s name? Doug Wilson.
That is probably too many words for an imagined 26 vs. 7 matchup. Wayne Gretzky averaged 2.67 points per game against the Kings in the playoffs in the 1980s. McDavid would need 11 points in the Oilers’ four-game sweep of these Kings to beat that, so every Edmonton hockey writer’s pre-series McDavid column is written. I even wrote the money quote.
“I guess I could,” McDavid says. “I haven’t really thought about it. I’m not concerned about my points. The most important thing is to win and stay healthy.”
Gold, Jerry. Gold.
Vegas region
No. 30 Columbus vs. No. 3 Vegas; No. 19 Calgary vs. No. 14 New York Islanders
Vegas tied with Colorado for the No. 1 record. The Golden Knights are good, but they went 27-5 against the West’s non-playoff teams and 10 of their 40 wins came in either three-on-three overtime or the shootout, which is not used in the playoffs.
Also, Patrik Laine could use a few days in Vegas after his lost weekend of a season in Columbus. Walk up and down the Strip and hope for better days ahead, in a province or state with lower taxes and in a city that does not roll up the sidewalks at 5:30 p.m..
The Calgary Flames are actually good, but ran out of runway with the 56-game schedule. The Islanders are OK, but they are deathly boring. The over/under on goals will be lower than the number of shady unpenalized things Matthew Tkachuk does that breaks Hockey Twitter but doesn’t get penalized by the referees. The Flames might win this one and improve their chances of earning the first overall pick and endearing themselves to Eichel.
No. 27 New Jersey vs. No. 6 Tampa Bay; No. 22 Philadelphia vs. No. 11 Nashville
If Tampa Bay repeats, do long-term injured list stashes Marián Gáborík and Anders Nilsson get their names on the Stanley Cup? Rewatching American Hustle recently affirmed, indirectly, that the Lightning off against the Devils. New Jersey, where parts of the movie take place, is known for shell games, and Tampa Bay general manager Julien BriseBois plays the long-term injured list shell game better than just about anyone. Tampa Bay also got cap relief from one-time scoring champion Nikita Kucherov laying out for the entire season, from Steven Stamkos missing a month of the season and from Florida’s lack of a state income tax meaning they could pay under the going rate when they add a contributor such as defenceman David Savard at the deadline.
As for the other series here, Nashville was very bad before March 15 and very good thereafter. It was the exact opposite for Philly.
Either a league has an honest salary cap or it does not. Other teams play the same accounting-tricks game that hurts the enjoyment of the sport since fans have to know a player’s cap hit before they can learn anything else about them. The Lightning are not the only team doing it, and it is also true that one of the 2020 Cup contributors that they had to let go, Carter Verhaeghe, is the third-leading scorer for Florida, the Lightning’s actual first-round opponent.
Either way, it sucks that the NHL lets this become a game that overshadows the actual games that should be the most important thing.
Tampa Bay’s stretching of the long-term injured list is even more abject due to the NHL’s failure to address the unearned entitlement of being a team in a jurisdiction without a state income tax. The NHL has four teams in places without a state income tax. All four — Tampa Bay, Dallas, Nashville and Vegas — have played in the Stanley Cup final since 2017. Pennsylvania, home of the ’16 and ’17 champion Penguins, has the lowest state income tax among NHL states.
Shurely some coincidence, although Arizona’s low state taxes will never make the Coyotes management any less gong-showy. Washington state also has no tax, so Seattle Kraken fans can picture a Cup final before any fans of Canadian teams can. We are selling hope here, after all.
That is more than enough for today. Please stay safe, and be kind.