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It's a Good Plan, but Only for This Time |
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The CBA ratified, labor peace assured until 2026, camps set to open, we went to bed Saturday night prepared for the best sleep since Ovie finally conked out in the summer of the Caps’ Cup.
The dreams were expectedly sweet at first: Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid proved more immune than even Garth Snow thought he should be from criticism. The tournament was completed with nobody getting any sicker than a Sabres fan of losing. Power plays were more efficient than ever without home fans to boo them. A vaccine that will keep Steven Stamkos healthy was in trials.
But it must have been 4 a.m. or so that things started to go bad. All the teams included in the tournament who had about as much chance to make the playoffs on March 12 as Brandon Manning to win the All-Star skills competition got through the qualifying round. They then beat all the clubs that were 1-2-3 in their divisions when the virus hit, the rewards for those good seasons proving to be only more rust to work off while the play-ins got in five games and the round-robin qualifiers only three.
The Coyotes won the Cup and their long-suffering fans died and went to heaven, before, dumb enough to go out celebrate in Covid-plagued Arizona, they literally died and went to heaven. A devastating second wave–one not seen since Messier and Anderson went into the 1980-81 Jets zone as Gretzky and Kurri were coming off–forced the proposed December 1 start of the 2020-21 season to be moved back to March 2025.
Nevertheless, we continued to sleep through all that more soundly than Ron Flockhart through a back-checking seminar. Didn’t bolt upwards in terror until we got to the part that the play-in round was deemed such a success that the NHL decided to adopt some form of it on a yearly basis. Our pillow was more soaked than Marco Scandella’s before a trade deadline. Our mouth was as dry as the Penguins’ prospect pool.
Arrrrrgh! Anything but another round of playoffs!
We can handle masks, gloves, and thermometer gizmos touching the forehead. After all this time without contact, feels good actually. Maintaining six feet distance takes some getting use to but is still far closer than Andreas Athanasiou ever came to anyone in the defensive zone so we can live with it.
Before this pandemic, we have endured the elimination of the pass to decide games via a one-on-one shooting competition, the creation of the trapezoid that punished elite skills in goaltending, the elimination of the red line that closed the game down much more than it opened it up, the three-point result, the wiping out of goals due to microscopic offsides missed up to 45 seconds earlier, and the addition of more franchises than even Mike Sillinger could play for.
We’ve endured all that and have kept coming back for more; in fact still can’t wait until August 1. But please don’t get any bright ideas about expanding the playoffs.
We get it for this time. Nashville and Vancouver were only a point out when the games stopped. Gary Bettman needed 24 teams to make this work so inevitably there had to be some passengers.
The Canadiens had 12 games left and were eight points behind but there was always the possibility that Dale Weise was about to get hot, so okay, let ‘em in. Florida, 7-12-3 in the last 22 at the shutdown, was just getting warmed up, so cut ‘em a break, fine. Never mind inspired runs to first-ever championships by Washington and St. Louis, the playoffs have been a total flop since the Blackhawks last won a round in 2015, so how could anyone fairly deny Patrick Kane, Duncan Keith and Jonathan Toews one last hurrah?
People are so starved for live sports that this August the Belleville Senators and Rockford Ice Hogs would get an audience. So this play-in round with no time conflicts for any games, creating a puck telethon, inevitably will be judged the greatest initial success since Jimmy Carson. So why not take it from here in future seasons? The more the merrier, right? Put the 16th and 17th best teams in the league against each other for one game to get in and it will be the greatest thing since the Flyers went to a shootout to beat the Rangers out of the last spot in 2010.
It was the first time that had happened in 92 league seasons. So why don’t we take something unique and make it mundane while we have the chance?
The only thing to like about how watered down has become the expanded NHL product is that once Seattle comes in exactly 50 per cent of the teams will make the playoffs, down from 16 out of 21 (76 per cent) before the Sharks were born in 1991.
Since then, the regular seasons have been increasingly less forgiving, the March stretch drives that much more compelling, and a greater number of seasons have been dumped in the trash where they belong, giving more legitimacy to the accomplishment of a playoff berth than ever.
If you think giving teams that can barely get to even the NHL version of .500 a reward is a good idea, then you aren’t old enough to remember the Norris Division of the eighties when, in 1984, the 32-47-1 Blues met the 21-42-7 Red Wings in the first round. These kinds of matchups were routine for several years in that swamp of a division and deservedly ridiculed. We haven’t heard a complaint about too many teams getting in, making the regular season meaningless for two decades. Let’s see if we can get those going again.
We advocated for the wild card in baseball for years before it was instituted in 1995 because more than just once there were 100-win teams that did not get into the playoffs. Six playoff teams out of 16 in a league still demanded a level of performance and seven do today, so we applaud the one-game play-in for the importance it puts on winning the division while cringing at the suicide drill of one single game deciding a season. We can see that argument both ways at least, but not adding middle-of-the pack teams.
There is no more room, thankfully, in a season that already goes to mid-June in a normal year to add a full fifth playoff round. But revenues are going to be down until the fans can come back inside so we smell a groundswell to squeeze in another, mini, round.
Under the unique circumstances of this so-far unfinished season, the NHL has a smart plan, not an excuse to hereafter give more teams a chance that they haven’t earned.
Blogger •NHL Hall of Fame writer • 
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