With the NHL postseason fast approaching, it’s not surprising that the discussion about playoff format — and the possibility of revising the current system, which few seem to like — is on the minds of many readers.
Here are two questions from a recent callout for our mailbag, which I wanted to tackle in greater detail.
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Alex B. asked: “Could you ever see the league moving to a 1 vs. 16 playoff format with more expansion? This would allow for more interesting matchups as well as a potential final between huge rivals, like Montreal vs. Boston, or Edmonton vs. Los Angeles.”
Rick W. asked: “Is there any appetite in the league (from the owners or managers) to go back to a 1 vs. 8, 2 vs. 7, etc., playoff concept, instead of going with the divisional rivals scenarios that we are seeing now? Something that rewards having a good regular season a little more?”
The short answers are almost certainly “no” to the first question, and a qualified “maybe” to No. 2.
But let’s discuss because if you go back to the beginning, the NHL has had more than 25 different playoff formats in over a century of operations. So, change is always in the wind.
The inaugural 1917-18 season began with four teams, but finished with only three because the Montreal Wanderers’ arena burned down after six games and they were forced to withdraw from the league.
The schedule was split into a first-half winner (Montreal) and a second-half winner (Toronto), who met in a two-game playoff for the right to play the winner of the Pacific Coast Hockey League (Vancouver) for the Stanley Cup.
Of all the formats they’ve had since then, my favorite is the one Alex B. suggested – in which the team with the best overall record gets rewarded by playing the team with the worst record that just managed to sneak into the playoffs.
It’s a system that was only in place for two years, coinciding with my first full-time years in the newspaper business.
The first year was 1979-80, after the NHL absorbed four teams from the World Hockey Association, increasing its membership to 21 teams, with the top 16 teams qualifying for the playoffs. It was an 80-game season and a fully balanced schedule. Matchups were determined by regular-season records, which meant No. 1 played No. 16, No. 2 played No. 15, and so on.
Once the first round ended, teams were reseeded – the team with the best-remaining record played the team with the worst record and so on, through rounds 3 and 4.
That year, two East Coast teams, the New York Islanders and the Philadelphia Flyers, played in a memorable Stanley Cup Final. The Flyers had had a 35-game undefeated streak that year — still a record — and the Islanders had been knocking on the door for a while. Under the current system, you could never have the Flyers and Islanders meet again in a final, as both play in the Metropolitan Division.
The next year, 1980-81, when the Atlanta Flames transferred to Calgary but continued to play in the Patrick Division, the Islanders won the Stanley Cup by defeating the Minnesota North Stars in the final. Calgary, in its inaugural season, met the Flyers in the quarterfinals, an epic seven-game series that involved a rigorous cross-country travel schedule.
The next year, the league realigned the divisions and amended the playoff system into divisional play. Starting in 1981-82, division winners played the division’s fourth-place team, the second-place team met the third-place team, and whoever emerged from the divisional playoffs played the other conference opponent for a right to go to the Stanley Cup Final.
On the plus side, that system created a lot of memorable Battle of Alberta and Battle of Quebec meetings in the mid-1980s, and it probably penalized some very good Winnipeg Jets teams that needed to get past both Edmonton and Calgary just to qualify for the third round — and never did.
The most egregiously unfair year was probably 1984-85. Edmonton had 49 wins that year (out of 80 games); Winnipeg 43; and Calgary 41. Meanwhile, the Norris Division champions, St. Louis, had 37 wins, and a 25-win Minnesota team made the playoffs. The Norris was such a sad-sack division for years that Sports Illustrated once wrote a memorable story, headlined: “How they bore us in the Norris.”
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It’s fair to say that every previous playoff format had its strengths and weaknesses, and the league has changed the system often, to overcome their various flaws. No format will ever be perfect, and the reason 1 vs. 16 was discarded so quickly was to create divisional rivalries, which could be compelling when teams were as talented as Calgary and Edmonton — and could get tiresome if they weren’t.
But 1 vs. 16 accomplished what the regular season was supposed to accomplish: It rewarded teams for October-to-April excellence by dishing up the weakest possible opponent.
In an age of parity, it doesn’t mean you’re necessarily getting a weak opponent. But there’s a fairness in the system that isn’t always the case in divisional play because annually, some divisions are stronger and deeper than others.
One of the main reasons why 1-vs.-16 went away was the logistics.
When you got down to crunch time, especially in the middle of the pack, sometimes you didn’t know until the final day of the season who you might be playing in the playoffs.
It forced teams to make all kinds of contingency plans. The unsung heroes of that era were the travel secretaries, who made the arrangements and then had to cancel the ones they didn’t need.
One such person was Al Coates. Coates was the Flames’ travel secretary and top PR man in the early days. Eventually, he became the team’s GM — and memorably made the Jarome Iginla-for-Joe Nieuwendyk trade.
Coates recalled in an interview that during the year in question — 1980-81 — the Flames were pretty much locked into seventh place overall. Boston and Minnesota were going to finish eighth and ninth, which meant, as the season was counting down, the Flames were going to draw the 10th seed. And that race went right down to the wire.
“Chicago and Quebec were tied with 78 points and Vancouver had 76,” Coates said. “Eventually, Chicago finished 10th by virtue of having one more win (31) than Quebec. But the bottom line was, we could have played Chicago, Quebec or even Vancouver in the first round and had travel plans in place for all three right up until game 79 and 80 were played.”
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In some ways, a 1-vs.-16 NHL playoff format looked a lot like a March Madness NCAA basketball bracket (except that the NHL reseeded after each round, another concession to fairness).
So, in 1980-81, a No. 14 seed took out a No. 3 (Edmonton over Montreal) and a No. 13 seed took out a No. 4 (Rangers over the Kings). Also, the ninth-seeded Minnesota defeated eighth-seeded Boston.
When the teams were reseeded for the second round, the Islanders took out Edmonton (1 vs. 8), but the 5, 6 and 7 seeds all upset their higher-seeded opponents. And in the semis, yet another upset occurred, Minnesota over Calgary. The Islanders, who were the top seed, were rewarded all along by drawing with the weakest remaining opponent and ultimately won the Stanley Cup.
How would a 1-vs.-16, 2-vs.-15 playoff look today?
For simplicity, I did this by points percentage, rather than total points, and compared the standings from March 1 to March 24. Things can change quickly in three and a half weeks.
On March 1, it would have looked like this:
• 1. Florida vs. 16. Tampa Bay
• 2. New York Rangers vs. 15. Philadelphia
• 3. Boston vs. 14. Nashville
• 4. Winnipeg vs. 12. Los Angeles
• 5. Vancouver vs. 13. Detroit
• 6. Dallas vs. 11. Vegas
• 7. Carolina vs. 10. Edmonton
• 8. Colorado vs. 9. Toronto
Washington was out of the mix, but was only 0.014 percentage points behind Tampa Bay, and Pittsburgh was still in contention, 0.021 percentage points out of 16th. Meanwhile, Minnesota, St. Louis and the Devils looked cooked.
Fast forward to March 24 and it looked this way:
• 1. Vancouver vs. 16. Washington
• 2. New York Rangers vs 15. Philadelphia
• 3. Colorado vs. 14. Vegas
• 4. Florida vs. 13. Tampa Bay
• 5. Boston vs. 12. Los Angeles
• 6. Carolina vs. 11. Nashville
• 7. Dallas vs. 10. Toronto
• 8. Winnipeg vs. 9. Edmonton
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St. Louis was on the outside, as the 17th placed team, even though the Blues had 79 points in 71 games compared to 77 in 69 for Washington. The difference was a scant 0.012 points percentage. Detroit had slipped of the picture, while Colorado and Tampa Bay were rising fast.
The regular season ends on April 18, so there are another three weeks of games to jumble the picture further. You could imagine that if you did this exercise every week between now and then, you’d have a completely different look to the playoff picture each time.
It’s a system that makes every playoff race matter — at the top, in the middle and at the bottom — right down to the wire.
Compare that to today’s lukewarm race to the finish line. While there’s still some mid-level jockeying, it’s nothing as compelling as it would be if the 1-vs.-16 system were adopted.
And the beauty of 2024 compared to 1980 is that now, the logistics are far easier than they were back then. No team flies commercial anymore. Every team charters flights.
And you could easily introduce a clause into the playoff agreement, whereby the team with the better record could opt to schedule the home and away games however they wanted to.
Alex B. thought the league might consider a 1-vs.-16 approach if further expansion were to occur because then you’d no longer have four tidy eight-team divisions. In my view, it’s more likely — if the NHL did add teams — that they would succumb to the pressure of adding a play-in round.
Or, if you didn’t want to call it a play-in round, because the commissioner has long resisted its siren call, you could give byes to the top 12 teams and then force the 13th to 20th teams to play a qualifying round, which is what they called it in the 2020 playoffs, during the pandemic.
Byes were, incidentally, also a part of several previous playoff iterations, but they were eventually done away because the feeling was that if a team sat around too long, it would lose its edge, and thus actually be penalized for its regular-season accomplishments. So, there’s always a flip side to every playoff coin.
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If there’s ever a change to the playoff system, it’s hard to imagine the NHL going to anything as radical as 1-vs.-16, though it would be interesting to see, if they ever did focus groups with their fan bases, if that wouldn’t be the format of choice for most.
Greater variety. Greater uncertainty right up until the witching hour. Just lots of things going for it.
And if you weren’t married to the idea that eight teams had to qualify out of each conference, suddenly fans in St. Louis and Minnesota would be far more engaged in the playoff races because they’d have a lot less ground to make up than they do right now if the top 16 teams by points qualified for the playoffs.
It’s too bad the NHL discarded this format as soon as it did.
It made the playoff races far more compelling than anything they’ve tried before or since.
(Photo of the 1980 Stanley Cup Final: Focus on Sport / Getty Images)
