NHL’s ruling on playoff seeding should remove talks of an asterisk on this season

The NHL has updated its rules for the upcoming 24-team playoff for the better.

Ever since the NHL proposed a 24-team playoff format in mid-March mere days after the league went on pause due to the coronavirus pandemic, there’s been concern about the legitimacy of this year’s Stanley Cup — should it be played at all. Given the weird — and downright chaotic — format the NHL and its players have agreed upon for the league’s return, is this year’s Stanley Cup winner set to have an asterisk on their name for years to come?

On Thursday, the NHL announced a few more details on the league’s 24-team playoff format. For starters, after the qualifying round, the teams will be reseeded, with the highest seed in each conference playing the lowest, and so on in descending order. Following the qualifying round, the remaining 16 teams will play in best-of-seven — not best-of-five — series until a Stanley Cup winner is decided.

Essentially, once we are past the best-of-five qualifying round, the NHL’s playoff format will feel like your typical Stanley Cup Playoff from previous years. The only catch is that the league will reseed the teams after every round, different from having a bracketing format from years past.

These changes fix a lot of the complaints about the NHL’s 24-team playoff format, which boiled down to being too complex and too unfair to the higher seeded teams that lost their advantage to playing so well during the 2019-20 season. With these changes, which the NHL players overwhelmingly pushed for, the league’s 24-team playoff format now feels more familiar in its design than before.

The NHL’s fixes to this year’s Stanley Cup Playoffs legitimize its winner.

In the lead up to the NHL’s announcement last week, there had been concerns that this season’s Stanley Cup winner will be illegitimate in the eyes of many due to its format and awkward pause mid-season. Nashville Predators forward Matt Duchene was one player that spoke out about the league’s unusual return to play plan, and how a team that wins this season’s Stanley Cup would likely be crowned the “COVID Cup” winner by many fans.

“You don’t want to have a ‘COVID Cup,’ and I’m worried that if we come back and try and force this thing and it’s a little gimmicky and it’s not quite right, whoever wins the Cup is going to have people try and take it away from them their whole lives,” Duchene said via the Nashville Post. “And they don’t deserve that… Our game is one of the games that has the most integrity in the world and I know our guys are going to want this to mean something if we do come back.”

In hockey circles, the debate about whether the team that wins this year’s Stanley Cup — if hockey does come back — would have an asterisk or not has been raging since the league started talking about return to play plans. With the league’s clarifications on the playoff format on Thursday, however, many of those fears should be unfounded.

With the league going to a best-of-seven format for every official playoff round outside of the qualifying one, the NHL is returning to your standard Stanley Cup Playoff format. Though there are concerns that the league going this route will make the playoffs drag into the late fall, the NHL is prepared to start the 2020-21 season in January if it has to.

Hockey is likely at the top of the big four sports in the United States in terms of luck’s role in the game itself. Reinstating a best-of-seven for every playoff round would put teams at the same playing field that a normal Stanley Cup Playoff has been in previous seasons.

The reseeding is a bit of a give and take, considering the top four seeds in each conference will play a round robin tournament to determine the seeding headed into the first round. Teams such as the Boston Bruins and St. Louis Blues lose out on any advantage they had in their strong seasons as the No. 1 teams in each conference to finish the season. It is still a slight to the league’s top teams — especially the Bruins, who were so far and away the best team in the Eastern Conference — but it’s the way the NHL has decided to go.

However, by reseeding through each round, the league’s top teams are given priority in this playoff, a welcome change from the league’s lackluster playoff format it usually uses to generate early rivalry series at the expense of worse series in the later rounds. This is how the playoffs should be normally, and it’s great to see the NHL go this route for this year’s postseason.

Sure, the abrupt end to the 2019-20 season is jarring and will be talked about for years to come, as will the NHL’s 24-team playoff format. However, at the end of the day, the core of the NHL’s playoff format remains intact, and will likely produce a Stanley Cup winner worthy of the title by year’s end, sans asterisk.

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