. . . when two teams above them have fewer points.
I first thought the conference standings here were wrong, but have confirmed them on a couple of other sites.
I get that Columbus and Montreal are seeded 1-2 because they are division leaders. But Boston and Toronto (51 points and 50 points, respectively) are above the Rangers (57 points). I thought other than the division leaders, the remaining ranking was simply points.
I’m embarrassed to have to ask this as a Canadian and all, but what gives?
Top 3 in each division are automatically in. The next two in the conference with the highest point total are the two wild card entries. So the standings start with the six auto qualifiers, then the rest in order of wild card standings.
Ah. Thank you. It’s mind-boggling enough to see the Leafs in playoff contention, and so the best explanation was the conference standings were simply wrong!
It’s a weird system, exacerbated by the NHL’s loser point system whereby you can have a worse W-L record than another team but finish ahead of them. Florida is 20-26 and Tampa Bay is 21-25, but Florida is ahead.
I am personally not a fan of any system where you have to examine the standings two or three different ways to figure out what the hell is going on. Of course, I am also not a huge fan of the NBA’s way of doing things, where each conference has three divisions but the divisions don’t matter. You could win your division and not qualify for the playoffs - unlikely, but mathematically possible. (Technically, it could matter if a team won the division and finished tied for the last playoff spot.)
Remember back in the old Norris/Adams/Patrick/Smythe days when your team would have 25 points more than another team (or two) but would still be left out of the playoffs (which practically everyone got into?) Now that was hockey!
It’s the same in the NFL, it’s common (probably more often than not) for a team with a higher seed in the playoffs to have a worse record than a lower seed wild card team, there’s always a strong and a weak division to cause this.
I think in the final analysis, the problem is the NHL system of “everybody wins!” when it comes to the playoffs. Compare that to MLB. In baseball there are really 8 teams that make it into any meaningful playoffs, 6 plus plus one wildcard winner that emerges from a one-game playoff in each league.
Hockey has a wildcard system, but it works differently than in baseball. Instead of two wildcards in each league competing for one place in the Division Series via a one-game playoff, the two wildcards in each conference are simply added to the already-crowded roster of 6 division leaders to make 8 teams, for a total of 16 teams entering the postseason.
16 teams out of 30 in the full playoffs. It’s ridiculous. And the first round of quarterfinals, unlike baseball’s best-of-five division series, is a best-of-seven. I love hockey, but when the humorist Dave Barry described the seasons associated with various sports and said that hockey season was basically “forever”, I think he pretty much got it right. I love the sport, but they really should stop pushing it to the breaking point.
The NHL has allowed sixteen teams into the playoffs since what, 1979? It’s actually become HARDER to make the playoffs. When Wayne Gretzky was scored 200 points a year, 16 out of 21 teams made the playoffs. Now it’s 16 out of 30, to be 16 out of 31 next season.
But back then, even if you thought it was too many teams (and it was) at least you could look at the standings and
Instantly understand who was in the playoffs and who was not, and
Not be flabbergasted that a team with a worse record was ahead of a team with a better record.
The vast number of playoff teams is admittedly matched by the NBA, and the NFL does let twelve teams into the playoffs, but the loser point system has no equivalent in the other major sports leagues. In the NBA, if Boston finishes the season with 49 wins and New York finishes with 48, Boston is ahead of New York. in the NHL, is is possible - in fact, it happens every year - that in that situation, New York could finish ahead of Boston. Teams have actually missed the playoffs in this way.
Having sixteen teams in the playoffs is not going away, but making the standings less stupid could be fixed in thirty seconds:
No wild cards. Top four teams from each “conference” make the playoffs. That’s it.
No loser points. Teams are ranked by the number of games they win, nothing else.
OK - a follow-up question: do the match-ups go 1 vs 8, 2 vs 7, etc.? So looking at today’s standings, Montreal (60 points, second place) would get a more difficult opponent (Rangers, 57 points, 7th place) than, say, Pittsburgh (61 points, fourth place) who would play Boston (52 points, 5th place)?
And with respect to the flow of the conversation, I think they should bring back the tie, and just have a 2-1-0 point system in the regular season, but I’m an old man who (barely) remembers the last time the Leafs won cup.
You didn’t really think it would be that simple. Pittsburgh would play Washington (2 vs 3 in each division play). The division winner with the best record (currently Columbus in the East) would play the wildcard team with the worst record (currently Ottawa).
In all rounds, the team with the most points will have home ice advantage in a 2-2-1-1-1 series.
Essentially all this does is reset the value of an OT/shootout loss to 0.333 wins instead of .5 wins, which is less stupid but it’s still stupid, and still creates a situation where a team with a worse record can make the playoffs over a team with a better record. Losing should be worth nothing. If you lose, you get a loss. It shouldn’t matter how little you lost by. Tough.
I hate ties. But under the old system, as D18 advocates, at least a tie is, you know, a tie. No winner OR loser was chosen. You can’t finish ahead of a team with a better winning percentage. But the purity of baseball or the NBA, where there are never ties, only wins and losses, is by far the preferable solution.
I miss the old Continental Basketball Association and its 7 point system - the team that won the game got 3 points, and the team that scored more each quarter got 1 point. I remember being fascinated by those standings as a kid when the local paper would print them.
I’m still not sure I understand the point of it however - more blowouts? less?
I remember somebody saying that teams would play hard for all four quarters. Even if you lost the first three quarters by 15 points every time and were down by 45 at the start of the fourth, you would still have incentive to play hard to salvage one point if you won the fourth. There was a feeling that NBA teams wouldn’t always hustle because of the long season and travel…even now there are games where teams like San Antonio and Cleveland will not bring their top players.
Critics say the “loser’s point” exists to create a false parity, that teams out of a playoff spot will seem closer than they really are. The “loser’s point” dates from 1999 when after 16 years of having a 5 minute overtime, the league decided teams were playing it safe too often in OT. They felt teams would try harder to score…historically in sports coaches are risk averse. But in 2005 when they went to shootout after a 5 minute OT (they felt fans wanted a winner in each game), they kept the loser’s point.
I’m assuming the people who follow European sports like rugby and hurling or follow Australian Rules Football have no trouble translating the NHL standings.
