The Great Mid-Season Tournament

In my last post I described my overwhelming lack of enthusiasm for the NHL All-Star Game, and asserted that it is not a particularly strong vehicle for promoting the sport of ice hockey. In this post I will suggest an alternative mid-season event that I think would be much more enjoyable and infinitely more meaningful (since the current all-star game is meaningless, and anything divided by zero is infinity).

The twenty-words-or-less version is this: I propose that both the Eastern and Western Conferences of the NHL conduct four-team, mid-season tournaments.

With a modest amount of juggling the league's schedule could be structured such that each team plays a reasonably balanced schedule prior to the date of this proposed event--that is, an equal number of home and road games versus an equal number of division, conference, and non-conference opponents. For instance, over the first forty-two games of the season each team could play sixteen games against division opponents (two home and two away against each of four opponents) sixteen games against non-conference opponents (eight home and eight away) and ten games against conference opponents outside of its own division. Or something like that. Then, after forty-two games have been played, the three division leaders and a wild card team from each conference get together and play a four-game, four-team tournament over the course of the weekend before the Super Bowl, with some extra points available in the standings.

Each of these little tournaments is composed of a first round and a second round, with the second round involving a third-place game and a championship game. The winners of the first round each get two points in the standings for a win, plus a bonus point. The eventual winner of the championship game gets another two points in the standings for a win, plus another bonus point, for a grand total of six points heading out of the tournament. There are no bonus points available in the third place game, but the winner still gets two points in the standings.

Unlike standard regular season games, there is no OTL point available in these games. This is to ensure that the runner-up will always come out of the tournament with more points (3) than the third place team (2). It would be cool to go with play-till-you-drop overtime in these games, but probably not a good idea, so ties will be resolved in the same manner as they are under the current rules. This goes against my general belief that an OTL point should be awarded if you're going to resolve games with shootouts, but I'm making an exception here.

These events would be held at venues that are selected before the season begins, allowing the proper marketing and merchandising blitz to take place. The Eastern Conference would start first, with the first game of the first round facing off at 12 PM Eastern Saturday, and the second game of the first round facing off at 3:30 PM. Then the Western Conference would start up in the evening, with the first game at 7 PM Eastern and the second game at 10:30 PM Eastern. The same schedule would be followed on Sunday, with the third-place game of course preceding the championship for each conference.

All this stuff about scheduling may seem trivial, but it's not. For an event such as this to really reach its full potential I believe it is essential that it be presented as four two-game sessions, with spectators buying one ticket and getting to see two games (and without having to leave in between). I've always found attending sporting tournaments to be a huge blast--I think that anyone who has attended the NCAA basketball tournament, the WCHA Final Five, the Minnesota State High School Hockey tournament, or any other event in which the final buzzer of one game induces a happy feeling because you know another game is coming right up knows what I'm talking about. It's like that scene in True Romance where the girl can't quite believe Christian Slater wants to take her to a Kung Fu movie, and he points out he actually wants to take her to three Kung Fu movies. You just know that three Kung Fu movies is way more than three times as good as one Kung Fu movie. Hockey's like that, too.

With potentially six extra points in the standings available to the winners, there would be a great deal to play for, so you know you would see all of the guts and intensity that is the heart of the sport. Even the third-place game would mean something. This event would put the best teams in the league on display, and it would address one oft-heard criticism of the NHL, which is that the games don't really matter until March. I personally think this particular criticism is bunk (ask any team that's missed the playoffs by a point), but we're talking about marketing, here, and perceptions are important. With a shot at six points as a reward for a strong first-half showing, I think this issue could be put to bed.

A pair of mid-season tournaments as I've described here would make for a vastly more exciting showcase event than the current all-star game. Let's give it a shot.