Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Race for Cup will be special no matter the format
Since 1893, or approximately since the last time the Flyers won it, the curators of highlevel hockey have been passing around the Stanley Cup. The only constant in that process has been that they have done it their way, thank you very much.
At the beginning, the trophy went to the best amateur side in Canada. Later, it would be presented to the winner of a challenge series between the NHL champion and the best team from the Pacific Coast Hockey Association.
One year, in what had to have been a reality-radio stunt, they snapped the NHL season in two, with the first-half winner and the second-half champion playing a two-game postseason series and the Cup going to the one that scored the most total goals. In 1920, the Ottawa Senators earned the thing without a postseason at all, having won both halves of the regular season.
The Western Canada Hockey League once had an automatic postseason bid. Later, the NHL split into American and Canadian divisions, with three postseason bids going to each. And here’s a pip: In 1967, the league doubled in size because of expansion, crammed all of the first-year teams into one group and, with its imagination meter at an historic low, just decided to call that the Western Conference. That included the Flyers, who were playing less than 90 miles away from Middletown, N.J., close to the Jersey shore. That curious format ensured that one of the expansion teams would play in the final round.
As recently as 1975, there were play-in rounds and byes into the quarterfinals. When fragments of the World Hockey Association were blended into the NHL in 1979, the Stanley Cup tournament was expanded to 16 teams. Ever since, the format has been massaged. And then there was 2004-2005. The NHL didn’t bother to play at all, not without a labor agreement. So the Tampa Bay Lightning was able to hang onto the Cup for two years. And Canadian hockey fans in 1893 would have guessed Niagara Falls would go dry before some pro team from the tropics would ever win that bloody trophy.
Anyway, that’s the brief history of the most cherished trophy in North American sports. It also explains its beauty. For through chunks of three centuries, it has made the rounds, yet with only one ultimate requirement: Play hockey well enough in whatever kind of tournament is agreed upon, hang onto it for a while, then bring it back when some other team plays hockey better.
James van Riemsdyk was discussing the Stanley Cup’s integrity and history Wednesday, on a conference call from his quarantined home in Minnesota. As a players’ representative on the NHL’s Return to Play committee, the Flyer from Middletown, N.J., will have a voice on how, when and why pro hockey will resume after what has been a two-month timeout to help flatten the curve of a pandemic. And while there is nothing that can un-flatten the effect of it all on the 2019-2020 regular season, van Riemsdyk is determined to ensure that whenever the Cup is awarded this spring, its value will not have been discounted.
“You said it,” he said. “I mean, certainly the integrity of that is highly important. And that’s something we are thinking about on this committee, how to balance that and manage that the best way we can. When you look around at every single other sports league in the world, I think hockey is the only league where you know what the trophy is, and it’s the Stanley Cup. So we want to keep that. We know how important that is, and how much pride we take as hockey players in that. And obviously we want a format that reflects that.”
When the season was halted, teams had played approximately 70 regularseason games. The Flyers had played 69. If the plan is to shoot right into a 24team playoff format, as seems to be the trending preference, there wouldn’t be any compromise to the affair. What? Were the New Jersey Devils made to apologize for winning the Cup in 1995 just because a labor issue butchered the regular season to 49 games?
“No matter what, it’s going to be a tough thing to win,” van Riemsdyk said. “There’s a lot of other factors that come into play for that, but certainly we want to do a format that respects that and keeps that integrity and competitive balance.”
The nature and timing of the lockdown will compromise the ability of players to return in premium pro-sports conditioning. But a 24-team tournament will be lengthy enough that by the time the Stanley Cup Final is played, it will be intense, competitive and historic, even if limited numbers of fans might be permitted to toss masks onto the ice whenever a player scores his third goal of a game.
“There’s a bunch of different formats being talked about,” van Riemsdyk said. “It’s hard to say which one is leading because things can change quickly. There were probably 10 different things that were looked at early on that probably aren’t feasible now.
“We’re trying to keep our options open, navigate through things and hopefully come up with a decision that, first, protects the health and safety of everyone and then protects that integrity and competitiveness that is so great about our game and so great about the Stanley Cup.”
Have a 24-team tournament. Or a 16-team tournament. Or a two-game tournament based on total goals. Some deserving team winning the prize is what matters.
Check the history. It’s all that has ever mattered.