Stanley Cup Playoffs will be re-seeded after every round
This year, the Stanley Cup Playoffs will be re-seeded after each round.
Every year, people complain about the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Yes, the postseason is terrific, but it has some major flaws. One of the most common grievances people have against the NHL’s postseason is that the brackets are never re-seeded. This makes it harder for the best teams to win, which is a bit odd.
It appears the NHL has, for the time being, decided to scrap the bracketed format of the 24-team expanded postseason. According to Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman, the playoffs will be re-seeded after each round.
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Another interesting thing to note is that the play-in round will be a best of five games series, which isn’t surprising. However, the remainder of the Stanley Cup Playoffs will remain in the best of seven games format. The players wanted both re-seeding and best of seven games series. Kudos to them for getting both.
What This Means
As an agent of chaos, I absolutely hate this. The NHL has never cared about the postseason being fair. It’s always been a long journey, stuck with unfair obstacles. This postseason is going to be the weirdest of all-time, so why not go all-in on the chaos?
However, there is a side of me that is logical and rational, even if I rarely show it. This makes a ton of sense and it’s a good thing. As I said before, the Stanley Cup Playoffs simply aren’t fair when you compare them to every other major sports league’s postseason. The NFL goes out of its way to re-seed after each round.
For the first time in quite some time (maybe even ever), the NHL will finally care about making things fair in the playoffs. That’s a huge step forward. Before, the top seed could, theoretically, have to play the team with the third-best record in the conference while the second seed might have to play the team with the fifth-best record. But this year, that’s not going to happen.
Part of what makes the Stanley Cup Playoffs so exciting is that it’s not fair. Upsets happen because the postseason’s format encourages them. The “best” team rarely wins if you’re strictly talking about regular season record. It’ll be weird seeing the Stanley Cup Playoffs be sort of fair, but maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe the best team will actually win, or at least it will be easier for them to win.