NHL still tinkering with its post-season formula

League flirting with having more play-off teams from California than Canada

Toronto Maple Leafs defenseman Dion Phaneuf, right, makes a play past Winnipeg Jets forward Bryan Little during their NHL ice hockey game in Toronto on April 5, 2014. Nathan Denette / AP Photo

North American hockey leagues do not have relegation. If they did, the Toronto Maple Leafs would be playing peewee against 11-year-old kids.

The NHL is forgiving. Sixteen of its 30 teams make the play-offs. The 14th-best team in the regular season may lift the Stanley Cup at the end of the post-season, as the Los Angeles Kings did in 2012.

Outsiders sometimes view such structures as a strain of socialism in North American life, wherein the last may be first. Really, this is plutocracy: the value of the elite’s private property is preserved and, where possible, maximised, but never destroyed.

The play-offs are where teams maximise income. Players are paid a pittance for the post-season games, and teams’ budgets factor in the number of play-off games they expect to host.

The NHL has often tinkered with its play-off structure, and this year is no exception.

There are still two conferences, but two (rather than three) divisions per conference, meaning one less automatic high seed for a division winner.

A flaw in the old formula was that the winner of the weakest division, automatically seeded third, could be a middling team. The team that faced them in the first round (the sixth seed) would catch a break. That flaw is gone.

Another still exists, though it is more difficult to correct with rules changes. Had the play-offs started after Friday’s games, the tournament would have had more teams from California (three) than from Canada (one).

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