Aaronp18 wrote:What I like is that, at least for the first round, chances are your opponent will be geographically close cutting down on travel and early games for us westerners.
Not that it evens things out for every team but we won't have a Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis road to the Cup!
Good point, I hadn't thought about the travel. Personally I really like the idea of more divisional matchups in the 1st round, so this new system bridges equality in the standings with the divisional rivalries. I mean, it would suck to see a couple of teams in the playoffs while 2 teams from another division miss out despite having more wins and points.....if you recall the old Southeast Division. I hated seeing Carolina seeded in 3rd when they had the same, or fewer, number of points as the 8th placed seed. This system is OK, although I would like to see it written that if the wildcard teams are from separate divisions, match them up against the top team in their own division regardless of 1/2 7/8 placing.
Aaronp18 wrote:
Cornuck wrote:
While we're at it, why a Regulation and OT wins more valuable than a Shootout win? Aren't we supposed to buy in to the league mentality that the shootout is part of the game now?
Well they should be more valuable because you should win/lose as a team not on individual skill of one aspect of the game, the shootout is a gimmick that has simply been instituted to keep games from ending in a tie.
I think the league has decidedly changed it's mentality, by possibly extending OT and going to a 3 on 3 format as well it seems they want to avoid shootout decisions as much as possible!
My problem with this issue is that the way they are doing it now is potentially saying that the loser point is more valuable than a shootout win. If LA manages to tie Winnipeg in points, they get the nod because of more ROW. However, they also have more OT/SO losses. 8 of their points have come from shootout losses, while only 5 of the Jets points have come from those. I think the way to do it would be to have simply have fewest loser points as the tie breaker since they are trying to reward the team win, just punish the team loss instead.