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Originally Posted by Bluenoser
On one hand I'm glad to see the 3 division per conference thing gone. Never liked it in hockey, and don't like it in Baseball. Well, let me say I don't like it because there's always a weak division where some team with 10 - 15 fewer points than a few others still gets the 3rd seed.
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The NBA addressed that issue by modifying the seeding rules such that division winners weren't guaranteed the top three seeds. Instead, they were only guaranteed to be in the top four, meaning a wild card team could be seeded as high as #2 if it had a better record than the other two division winners.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bluenoser
Don't like wildcards, never have.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bluenoser
What I'd prefer to see is, the 2 division winners seeded 1-2 based on points (and other tie breakers if/as required) then rank the remaining 14 teams (12 in one conference currently but would be 14 with 32 teams) from 1 - 14 and the top 6 points wise get in the play-offs (since they insist on having 16 teams make it in, but that's another subject).
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You realize you're contradicting yourself, right? You don't like wild cards yet you advocate there being six wild card qualifiers in each conference.
The new format is weird. It's nominally a division-based format yet you could have the first place team in one division playing the fourth place team in the other division while the second and third place teams in each division play each other. The system mixes seeding and positional qualifiers as well as mixing a fixed and open playoff bracket. (It's so unusual I'm at a complete loss as to how to integrate into the customizable playoffs proposal I'm working on for FHM. I've got just about everything else covered, but the NHL's new format is unprecedented and doesn't fit at all within the playoff creation system I've set up. It's got me scratching my head over what to do...)
I don't know why they went with it rather than the simpler system involving the top four teams in each division with a crossover qualifier in cases where a fifth place team in one division had a better record than the fourth place team in the other division. It achieves almost the same result but in a simpler to understand way.