How I would change the NHL schedule

This is how I would tweak the NHL schedule

Sometimes you Tweet something and think, “hey, I should expand on that.”

And more often than not, you get lazy, and forget to ever do that expansion.

That was my thinking this morning when still seeing some twitter reactions to this Tweet.

Sean Shapiro @seanshapiro

Since we are all throwing out crazy NHL schedule ideas today, here is mine: Play every team twice, home and away, for 62 games. At that point split league into two groups, top 22 and bottom 10. (1/2)

Sean Shapiro @seanshapiro

Remaining 20 games are played within your grouping. Top-16 still make playoffs from top-22. In bottom 10 grouping you start new mini 20-game season with team with best record winning No. 1 overall pick in the draft. (2/2)

So, let’s expand.

As the Tweet says, we build an 82-game schedule that gets every team into every building, and then effectively has a recalibration moment after 62 games.

For the first 3/4ths of the season, each team plays every other team home-and-away to create that 62-game sample size. This gets every team into every building and all with the exact same opponents, so in theory everyone has the exact same strength of schedule.

At this point we split the league into two. As one Tweeter point out it works better with a 21/11 split than a 22/10 split, so kudos to them and we’ll go with that.

Filip Dostal @netorack

@seanshapiro You should split it 21/11 to achieve tidy 20 games schedule in the second part of the season.

The top 21 teams play each other once, with the top-16 reaching the NHL playoffs in a 1 through 16 re-seeded format. (Standings continue on from the 62 game mark, we don’t want to devalue what a team has done for 3/4ths of the season). This gets 20 games of playoff-level opponents for 21 markets, which is great to sell if you are an owner or team executive.

The schedule remains balanced, everyone is still playing the same opponents, we have a true even strength of schedule across the league.

The bottom 11 teams play each other twice, home and away, for 20 games, and they enter that mini-20 game season with the points effectively re-set to zero. The team with the top record of the bottom-11 league (we can sponsor it, drive revenue!) gets the No. 1 pick in the draft. The team with the second-best record gets the No. 2 pick, so on, and so forth.

By my logic, which I admit can be faulty, this eliminates true tanking by owners and GMs. While a bad team may want to be in the bad zone, they can’t truly tank because they have to win games against their peers over the final 20 games.

For an example of this, in theory it could have looked a little bit like this last season.

It wasn’t a clean break, but was the rough NHL standings after 62 games last season. These would have been your bottom-11 teams.

Now imagine those fan bases having an opportunity to re-set and root for wins, not losses over the final 20 games.

Each game would matter and as a business owner, you can sell that as a storyline to keep people’s interest.

Someone pointed out to me on Twitter that players don’t care about draft picks. Which is true, which is why a true single-elimination tournament for the No. 1 pick would never work, but a re-defining of 1/4th of regular season, in my mind would.

Players and coaches don’t tank, they try to win on a nightly basis even when their owner or GM is pulling the plug on things. This system is based on forcing the GMs and owners to not pull the plug, give us meaningful games across the board, and potentially avoid true tanking.

There are flaws with this plan, I get that. In fact, I’m willing to discuss the flaws in the comments below. But figured we could have some fun with this.