NHL playoff length and reseeding. Right moves? Or bad decisions?
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The National Hockey League is continuing to inch back toward playing. The Penguins are supposed to resume small-group workout sessions at the UPMC Lemieux Performance Complex in Cranberry on Tuesday.
This is a lightning pace toward getting back to action compared to Major League Baseball. But things are crawling along if you consider that we may still be over a month away from playing games.
At least a little progress was made in terms of ironing out the playoff format recently. If a rebooted season can actually get off the ground, the NHL has cleared up two nagging questions about how the postseason structure would work.
1. The NHL will reseed the playoffs after each round. There won’t be hard brackets in place.
2. Every round after the initial round will be a best-of-seven format. Not best-of-five.
The first decision was a good one. The second decision I could take or leave.
Let’s start with the reseeding.
The league already married itself to a round-robin plan for the four top teams in each conference.
In the Eastern Conference, that means the Boston Bruins, Tampa Bay Lightning, Philadelphia Flyers and Washington Capitals will all play one another in a round-robin format to determine the 1-4 order of seeding.
Meanwhile, seeds 5-12 will battle in best-of-five series to advance into the main playoff bracket.
Having a hard bracket could immediately neuter the results of the round-robin depending on how many upsets there were in the preliminary series.
For instance, let’s say the Flyers — currently seeded fourth — surprisingly win the round robin and get the winner of the 8-9 matchup.
In the meantime, if the 12, 11 or 10 seed wins a first-round contest, suddenly now, in a hard bracket system, the Flyers wouldn’t wind up playing the team with the lowest seed anyway.
So reseeding especially matters if you are planning to pin any sort of importance to the preliminary round robin.
As far as the length of the series after the preliminary rounds, staying with the best-of-seven format makes more sense from the standpoint of tradition, replicating a true postseason, and filling potential television slots.
However, if a significant issue to this whole pandemic reality is trying to get through this process as fast as possible before the coronavirus potentially shuts down the league again, why not make at least the conference quarterfinals a best-of-five? If not the conference semifinals, too.
That also would be consistent for the clubs who didn’t play a series in the preliminary round and were instead part of the round robin.
Brian Metzer of the Penguins Radio Network and I debate these matters and more in our weekly hockey podcast. We also look into the logistics of these small-scale workouts, the mindset of the Montreal Canadiens in advance of their first-round series against the Penguins, and the ever-expanding NHL calendar.