As the second round of the NHL playoffs begin, why aren’t certain owners of NHL teams speaking out about the match-up their team has?
As the Penguins play the Capitals, the two best teams in the regular season are going head-to-head. In a span of time that will last somewhere between four and seven games, one of them will be gone.
Meanwhile, the number ten seed, St. Louis, gets the sixteen seed, Nashville.
Ted Leonsis, why aren’t we hearing from you?
Mario Lemieux?
If we are to grab a really low estimate, teams make roughly one million dollars per home game in the playoffs. Many of them make more.
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Washington would have a much better chance of getting to the third round and millions more in revenue if they were playing Ottawa. There is no guarantee, but good business people weigh the odds all the time. How else do they become good business people?
Fans complain all the time about how little the regular season actually means. Under the current playoff format, you are rewarded in the first round and that’s where it ends.
When the league brought in this latest incarnation of divisional alignment, it was to try to create rivalries. More Montreal vs Toronto and New York Rangers vs New York Islanders. Back to those days of the Adams, Patrick, Norris and Smythe division showdowns.
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Two things played into those rivalries.
First, there were only 21 teams. And certain teams (see Hartford Whalers, Winnipeg Jets, New Jersey Devils and pre-Mario Pittsburgh Penguins) were rarely good.
Certain clubs really did play each other all the time.
You can’t duplicate that now. There are too many teams and the parity that every league strives for actually serves to make match-ups more random that common.
Secondly, you have to look at the Detroit-Colorado factor. You cannot create rivalries like you are writing a Hollywood script or staging a 1990s hockey fight.
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Something has to happen. Something has to act as a spark that gets the teams and fan bases engaged.
The Red Wings and Avalanche had no ancient history to rely on as they entered the mid to late nineties. In fact, in Detroit’s run of four Stanley Cups between 1997 and 2008, the Red Wings played Colorado just one more time than they play the Ducks (both Mighty and new generation).
Do you consider the Ducks and Detroit big-time rivals?
Detroit’s playoff encounters with Colorado did tend to come in later rounds and you could easily argue that they had more at stake, but without a catalyst like Claude Lemieux and some classic Patrick Roy moments, the teams might have taken on a “you again” mentality and gone about their merry ways.
Win some-lose some. (Detroit won three of the five)
But it blew up. You could easily say it was the largest rivalry of that time period.
Under the current playoff format, it would have happened a whole lot less.
Go back to rewarding teams for their regular seasons and more importantly, go back to giving owners a better shot at making more money for long playoff runs. That is a major component of sports in the 21st century.
When you try to script things in movies, it works fine. It can be Academy Award winning.
When you try to do it in life, you can wind up like the guy who plans out every second of a first date and then sprains his ankle getting out of the car.
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