Monday, April 9, 2012

Plus-Size NHL Playoffs?

I might as well start my first true post about something that I know will aggravate the NHL fans I know.  Hockey is quickly becoming a favorite sport of mine.  I never followed it at all prior to a few years ago, but more recently I can't seem to get enough.  I've become a Devils fan due to a number of factors over the years.  I was very excited that they made the playoffs this past week after a dismal showing last year.  Unfortunately, I was more excited by the fact that they managed to only win enough games to finish as a #6 seed for the playoffs.  Why?  Because they now have arguably the easiest first round match up in the post-season.

The Devils won't have home ice to begin the playoffs, but they will have to travel to south Florida to face the #3 seed Panthers in round one.  Despite the higher seed, the Panthers have less wins than the 15 other seeds who enter the playoffs, and the only team not to reach 40 wins (38 for the year).  They won a weak Southeast division with a lot of overtime losses.  The logic behind the overtime wins/losses is very flawed, but that's a topic for another day.  The point I'm driving at is the size of a 16-team playoff system.

I know most diehard NHL fans love the system, but while I'm happy to see my team in the post-season, I can't help but feel it is a little undeserved.  I simply don't understand the logic of taking more than half the teams in a league to participate in a playoff.  Playoffs merely exist for entertainment, and to be honest, sports are suppose to be a form of entertainment, so they do their job in that aspect.  However, the larger they get, the more they reward undeserving teams with second chances, and punish the better teams who are forced to defend a title they should have already been awarded.

The classic argument is that the NHL playoffs work as a "second" season for the teams.  I've heard it from numerous NHL fans, so I guess this idea has made the rounds.  The concept makes sense until you look at it as a game of numbers.  The NHL regular season has been 82 to 84 games long for the past twenty years (the exception being the lockout-shortened 1994-95 season.  Assuming the average NHL playoff series were to go 5.5 games, the average number of playoff games each team would play would be 10.3 games.

Avg. NHL Series assumed to be 5.5 games.

# of NHL Playoff Series each Season = 15 (8+4+2+1)

Each series has two teams so 2 * 15 = 30

Avg. # of Playoff Games = (30 * 5.5) / 16 total teams involved = 10.3 games per team.

Given that there are 82 games in the regular season now, the regular season should be weighted nearly 8 times more than the playoffs for determining who the best team is.  That isn't to suggest the playoffs shouldn't be used.  Otherwise, you could use this argument to put down the value of the playoffs for any sport.  It merely suggests that the playoffs should probably be more exclusive, and generally only include 1/8 of all the teams involved in the regular season.  In this case, 1/8 of the 30 teams in the NHL would be roughly 4 teams.

Of course that goes against the initial concept of the playoffs: entertainment.  I feel a compromise would simply be something along the lines of 8 teams.  Unfortunately, so long as television marketing and dollars run the sports world, decreasing playoff teams will never happen.  However, for those teams that win all season, win their division, win their conference, and sometimes win the President's Cup, it becomes truly unfair to have to defend that against a team that posted a losing record for the year.  It might be looked upon as lopsided series, but upsets happen, and losing 4 games to an underdog doesn't mean you're worse than the team that lost more than half of it's 82 games leading into it.

Just some numbers...
  • Since the 1992-93 season, an average of 1.9 teams without a winning record make the playoffs every year including two this season.
  • Over that same period, only once when that average was met did the Stanley Cup Finals present two teams that were both seeded in the top three in their respective conference (1996-97).
  • Same period, only 7 times has the winner of the President's Cup ever gone on to win their own conference playoff bracket.
If you enjoy parity over watching the best teams in the league decide a championship, the current format is perfect.  Cinderella stories?  It's fantastic for them as well.  If you enjoy seeing the best that the East has to offer versus the best that the West has to offer, then it's being done all wrong.

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