Chicago Tribune (Sunday)

Blackhawks would get a postseason berth as part of 24-team playoff if NHL resumes.

24-team playoff pits Hawks against Oilers in huge turn of events

- By Phil Thompson

The NHL’s players union approved a playoff format that will send 24 teams to the postseason when the league lifts its coronaviru­s lockdown.The Blackhawks would face the Oilers in a five-game playoff series in their return to play.

Though it was rumored as a likely scenario when NHL play resumed, it still represents an incredible turn of events for a Hawks team that faced long odds of reaching the postseason.

The Blackhawks had a 2.5% chance of making the playoffs, and one-tenth of a percentage point of winning the Stanley Cup, according to HockeyRefe­rence.com’s playoff probabilit­y report, based on 1,000 simulation­s of the remaining regular season schedule.

The Hawks talked about the playoffs as a goal leading up to March 12, when the NHL suspended play because of the coronaviru­s pandemic, but at February’s trade deadline the team shipped out goaltender Robin

Lehner, who had been splitting games with Corey Crawford, and defenseman Erik Gustafsson, at a time when injuries had hurt the defensive end.

But fate (or perhaps TV ratings) worked in the Hawks’ favor.

Players and team executives debated whether to stick to a strict 16-team playoff structure — based on the traditiona­l points standings — or expand the field to as many as 24 teams.

Not all 31 teams played the same number of games before the shutdown, so some teams in the hunt for a wild card would’ve been shortchang­ed.

But Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman, who first reported the current 24team proposal on Thursday, speculated that the Hawks’ and Canadiens’ devoted fan bases factored heavily into the groundswel­l of support to broaden the playoff field.

“Oh, it has everything to do with it,” Friedman told the hosts of the “Lead Off With Ziggy and Scotty Mac” radio show. “I got a text yesterday from a GM, ‘This is all your fault.’ And I laughed and I go, ‘What do you mean?’ (He replied,) ‘You TV guys, you’re perverting this playoffs.’”

Friedman said there wasn’t “unanimous happiness” with the format, which some players and executives told him weren’t fair to teams with strong regular-season records.

Hurricanes player representa­tive Jordan Martinook said Wednesday, “I feel like if you’re doing the 24-team thing, it basically gives a team a chance that had no chance of making it, which if you play 82 there’s maybe 6, 8% chance that the team in 12th place (in the conference) makes it.”

Friedman said on the radio show, “If you do the odds, OK, you take a look at the teams and what their percentage­s were of making the 16-team playoff. Montreal was at zero, Chicago I think was at 3%, if you put rounding in it. And now their odds are significan­tly higher, and teams like Carolina and Toronto, their odds are significan­tly lower.”

In fact, at least one analyst favors the Hawks in a playoff matchup against the Oilers.

The Edmonton Journal’s David Staples cited Charting Hockey’s Sean Tierney, who ran a seven-game playoff simulation.

“I ran these matchups through a playoff simulator to save the NHL some time,” Tierney told the Journal.

Based on Tierney’s game-by-game breakdown, in a five-game series the Hawks would win in four.

 ?? CHRIS SWEDA/CHICAGO TRIBUNE ?? Patrick Kane, right, and Jonathan Toews were seemingly out of playoff contention until NHL’s expansion of the playoffs.
CHRIS SWEDA/CHICAGO TRIBUNE Patrick Kane, right, and Jonathan Toews were seemingly out of playoff contention until NHL’s expansion of the playoffs.

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