STANLEY CUP SURPRISE
Hawks qualify for playoffs as NHL expands tournament to 24 teams
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 Hockey-Reference.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 24-team proposal on Thursday, speculated that the Hawks’ and Canadiens’ devoted fan bases f a c t o re d h e av i l y 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. Meanwhile, Sportsnet’s Mark Spector wrote that he expects the Oilers to take advantage of the Hawks’ weak defense and win the series in four games. The Hawks earned their first win of the season against the Oilers and were 2-1 against them, though both wins were at home.
In another scenario, the Hawks would’ve played the Stars, who have 82 points to the Oilers’ 83, which is the traditional way of determining the seeds. But the Stars have a stronger record (.594) than the Oilers (.585) and have played two fewer games.
Under the format the NHL Players Association approved late Friday, the seeds will be based on standings by points percentage, which is what knocked the Oilers down to the No. 5 slot in a play-in bracket against the No. 12 Blackhawks.
If the Hawks were to make it into the round of 16, it gets tricky from there.
As the seeds stand now, the Hawks would face the No. 4 Stars. The bracket is based on the presumption that the fifth seed would advance to face the fourth seed, and the winner of the eight-nine pairing would take on the No. 1 seed, and so forth.
But each conference’s top four teams likely will play against each other in a round-robin tournament that could either re-seed the top four seeds or simply serve as a tune-up with no playoff consequences. The former is more likely, according to multiple reports.
In that case, the Hawks could end up facing the Blues, Avalanche or Golden Knights just as easily, depending on where the teams settle after the round robin. There also are proponents for re-seeding the field after each round, which would pit the Hawks, if they beat the Oilers, against the Blues, who currently are the top seed. The Blues swept the Hawks in all four games this season.