Things we’d change in sports Seed pro playoffs by overall records
This is the second installment in our Things We’d Change in Sports series.
This season in the NBA, two Eastern Conference teams with sub-.500 records were currently in the playoff field going into Monday.
Last season, the Nashville Predators owned the NHL’s best regular-season record and were eliminated in the second round of the playoffs by the Winnipeg Jets, the team with the league’s second-best record.
That’s evidence in support of USA TODAY’s proposal to change the playoff format of the four major professional sports to determine qualification and seeding on regular-season records. Our argument: It’s a fairer system.
“It’s a discussion we’ve had with our board (owners) before,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said last summer. “I’ve said before that the most significant obstacle to seeding 1 through 16, as appealing as that would be to me and a lot of fans, is the dramatic increase in travel that would follow.”
If the qualification-by-record (not division) was in place during the last baseball season, the teams would have been the same. But the top four seeds (Boston, Houston, Oakland and New York Yankees) would have been from the American League. If that were used in this past football season, the Pittsburgh Steelers would have been in and Philadelphia would have been out.
The travel argument against this idea has grown stale, particularly in this era of private planes and four-star travel accommodations. While it isn’t ideal if Vancouver played Tampa Bay in the first round of the NHL playoffs and Miami faced Golden State in the opening round of the NBA postseason, isn’t the payoff worth the inconvenience?
Silver believes travel is a bigger issue than people realize. “We could be looking at roughly 40 to 50 percent more travel,” he said. “And it would affect teams disproportionately. Those on the coasts would travel more than those in the middle of the country.”
One NBA Western Conference coach dismissed the travel conundrum, telling USA TODAY he would prefer to make the playoffs even if it meant more travel. In this age of traveling trainers and medical staff, he wasn’t worried about the toll of travel. The coach requested anonymity to speak freely on the topic.
Silver also said, “It doesn’t mean we can’t, but it’s not something we could do quickly because it would require a wholesale re-examination of how we do the schedule (and) how our television deal works in terms of the spacing of the games in the playoffs.
“So we’re going to look at it. I think it has a real appeal to ownership, and I know it does to fans. It’s just not such an easy thing to implement.”
Dallas Stars general manager Jim Nill said there would be pros and cons to shifting to a playoff determination strictly by record. “The pro would be if you get first place, it’s nice to know you kind of get to play a lesser opponent to a degree, but parity has even changed that in our league,” Nill said. “But time zones are a big part of it, especially for television. For us, it helps to play a team in our time zone.”
A change to seeding by record, without regard to teams’ conference or league, would also allow for teams in the same conference to meet for a title. The New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox could meet in the World Series. The Dallas Cowboys could play the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl, and the Washington Capitals and Pittsburgh Penguins could battle for the Stanley Cup.
Unlike the NBA, the NHL hasn’t looked at the qualification-by-record format. “There is general satisfaction with our existing playoff format and feel it is accomplishing what it was intended to accomplish — i.e., encouraging and emphasizing rivalries and rivalry matchups in the early rounds of the playoffs,” NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said via email. “That typically leads to more compelling matchups and higher ratings for our rights holders.”
Daly said the league does re-evaluate internally, after every season, to determine whether there is recurring inequity that compels change.
“I can’t say that we have ever been satisfied that there is one,” he said. “People should remember that teams play unbalanced schedules, which are weighted toward more divisional and intraconference games. Any move toward a format based primarily on seeding should necessarily take that into account and may require a corresponding change in our current scheduling matrix. That’s a fact that not everyone appreciates.”