Is it just me, or are sports even crazier than usual lately?
Virginia won March Madness a year after being the first one-seed in history to lose their opening contest in the tournament. Then, not to be outdone, the legend of Tiger Woods took another monumental forward leap with his victory at Augusta a few weeks back.
That would’ve been enough to tide me over for a quite a while.
But there are no days off in the world of sports, and the first round of the NHL Playoffs has now added to this stretch of ridiculous stories that are sure to reverberate in sports conversations for years to come.
The Columbus Blue Jackets shocked the hockey world when they went on a trade deadline shopping spree, only to over-justify their actions by sweeping the Tampa Bay Lightning, arguably the greatest regular season team ever composed in any sport under a hard salary cap.
The defending champion Washington Capitals looked like they were going to breeze through to the second round, but then dropped four of the final five games in their series against Carolina. The Hurricanes are an up and coming team to be sure, but one that lacks really any star power relative to the Ovechkins and Kuznetsovs of the world.
In the West, the NHL’s other top seed in the Calgary Flames followed Tampa’s lead and got thoroughly embarrassed by Colorado, a team that had to play just about perfectly down the stretch just to scrape into the playoffs. The Flames had no answer for the top line of the Avalanche, essentially allowing two guys (MacKinnon and Rantanen) to boot them from the dance in a mere five games.
The Nashville Predators, who many believed would be a dominant force for many years after their loss in the 2017 Cup Final to Pittsburgh, couldn’t get nearly enough pucks past Ben Bishop in their six games against the Dallas Stars. Another top seed eliminated.
Four division winners, four early exits.
This marks the first time in NHL history that no division winner has made it to the second round of the playoffs. Equally astonishing is the fact that only three of the top ten teams in terms of points remain in the hunt for Lord Stanley’s Cup.
This leads us to the overarching question that serves as the thesis for this article…
Can too much parity be a bad thing?
The simple answer to this question for most I suspect would be an emphatic no. Most people love the NHL Playoffs because no matter what talent disparity may exist between two opposing clubs, any team can beat any other in a seven game series. It is this very reason (again, I would expect) that Columbus went all-in at the trade deadline in the first place. There is no other league where a bubble team would make a move like Columbus did. They brought in a high profile UFA in Matt Duchene to pair alongside their other high profile UFAs in Artemi Panarin and Sergei Bobrovsky, three men that more likely than not will be suiting up for different teams come October. Instead of trading their superstar winger and goaltender for future assets, the Jackets decided to let these men potentially walk out the door for nothing in return except one tremendously bold run for a Cup.
Furthermore, this year is clearly an anomaly. While we always expect an upset or two in the opening round of the NHL Playoffs, this year has just been insane. The way that first round went down will likely never occur again, and therefore making use of it as an argument against the league’s parity would largely be a foolhardy activity.
I love the NHL, and a major reason for that is because I love parity. In no other professional sport is the intensity level ramped up more, nor is the occurrence of upsets so prevalent, than in the first round of the NHL Playoffs.
Therefore, this article is intended to play the role of “Devil’s Advocate.” Like it or not, the truly unbelievable number of early upsets in the NHL over the past couple of weeks has left us with a watered down field for the Cup run. While it was awesome to see the Penguins, Lightning, Capitals, Leafs, Flames, Predators, Jets, and Golden Knights get eliminated, did it really all have to happen at the same time? The first round was the most chaotic it has ever been, but doesn’t that mean the rest of these playoffs could disappoint?
Disclaimer to hockey fans: I’m not saying that the hockey to come won’t be awesome. There are several hungry underdogs remaining that are all playing great and that all believe it’s their turn. I’m just saying that nearly every one of the most exciting and star laden teams have been eliminated, and thus, that the remainder of these playoffs would’ve been better had at least some of them advanced.
Back to work.
The NHL is great because of its parity, but that same thing that makes it great has set us up for a lackluster group down the stretch. After just one round, whoever ends up winning the Stanley Cup will have to say they did it without facing the top tier talent that this league has to offer (not that they’ll care…). Like I said, only three of the league’s top ten teams cracked the final eight.
There isn’t any room for upsets left because there aren’t any more teams to upset.
While all that serves as part of the reason for writing this article, the real impetus for this work stems from my simultaneous viewing of the NBA Playoffs. I’m not going to go into the details of the NBA’s soft cap and its subsequent effect of allowing the formation of “super teams,” that dead horse has been beaten enough. I also can’t stand how much pull star players are gaining in the Association in their recruiting of fellow elite talents, and their open discussions with the media about who they want to play with or their trade demands, an article for another day perhaps.
So say what negative things you will about the NBA (and be damn sure that I have a lot of them as well), but one thing it always has going for it is that come playoff time the best teams are always duking it out for the title in the last couple rounds.
While it was a lot of fun seeing the biggest stars in the NHL getting ousted early, wouldn’t it be even more fun to watch them battle each other for the title?
Once again I’ll make an assumption. I would expect most would answer yes to this question, but the only league that guarantees that this will be the case is the NBA, a league that is starved of parity.
So what we’re left with is a “pick your poison” type of situation. In the NBA, we are pretty confident before the season even begins who the final four or even eight teams are going to be. It makes the regular season nothing more than a jockeying for home court advantage among elite teams, and the first round of the playoffs essentially irrelevant, but we know that the best players and the best teams will be there at the end, and that the last few rounds of the playoffs will make for fantastic television.
In the NHL, we have a general outline of which teams are good and which aren’t, but the regular season never falls short of surprising fans both with teams that were “supposed” to be good that aren’t, and teams that were “supposed” to be bad that play great. Furthermore, as evidenced this year, once we get to the postseason anything can happen. In poker the saying goes that to win all you need is “a chip and a chair.” In the NHL, as proven time and time again, all you need to win is one of those 16 spots. Anything can happen from there, including scenarios like this year. I can assure you that television network executives are pulling their hair out over the lack of star power that will be featured over the final three rounds of the tournament.
One league with no parity that has a best-case scenario for its final eight, and another with so much parity that all of the league’s best teams are hitting the golf course early.
For me, the NHL is a much better league than the NBA, and parity is the centerpiece in the formation of that opinion. However, with that being said, I will undoubtedly be watching the remainder of the NBA Playoffs both more frequently and with much more enjoyment than I will the NHL Playoffs. The NBA has nothing left but its stars (sans Lebron…) and matchups I was dreaming about before the season began. While I’ll continue to watch the NHL until its completion, there is no question that I will be left wondering how much better it could have been if more elite talents and teams were a part of it.
What makes the ambition of this year’s Blue Jackets awesome is the fact that hockey is the only sport that something like that will ever happen. Columbus was a fringe playoff team when they made their deadline moves, and actually struggled immediately after it happened. They then went on an absolute heater to take the final playoff spot from Montreal just to get their matchup with Tampa, the best team the NHL has ever produced in the salary cap era. While sweeping the Lightning certainly justifies their actions, a sweep in the other direction would have left 100% of hockey fans uttering “What the hell was Columbus thinking?”
The thing is, in the NBA, the teams at the top are so far ahead of the rest of the field that even teams firmly entrenched in the bottom half of the playoff picture are reluctant to pull the trigger on big moves. They know what everyone else knows. There is no move that middle-of-the-pack teams can make to push them into title contention. There are probably only four to six teams (or in recent years, one) that have a legitimate opportunity to win the Larry O’Brien Trophy in a given season in the modern NBA landscape. A fact that, for lack of a better term, sucks. This truth is preventing every team that isn’t a heavy hitter from going for it. It makes teams cautious, preferring to wait until what they believe is the right time. For that reason, there will never be a Columbus Blue Jackets (or anything close to it) like move in the NBA.
This makes for a needless regular season, a destructive opening round of the playoffs of higher seeds dominating the lower ones, and then, after 82 games plus a round of best-of-sevens, the NBA season finally commences.
No parity in sight, but nothing but elite talent at the end.
In the NHL, it’s always the right time to make a move, and it’s because of seasons like this one. It’s exciting, middle-of-the-packs teams will always make big splashes because they know that come April any team can prevail. But in seasons such as this one, it’s difficult not to wish that at least some of those crazy upsets didn’t go down, because look at what we’re left with…
Yes the NHL Playoffs are known for crazy upsets, but this season’s first round took it to a new level. More often than not the two teams left standing in the Cup Final are not the two best teams in the NHL. But is it wrong to wish that they would be? Parity is indeed what makes the NHL such an amazing league, but wouldn’t it be great to have a couple dream matchups to look forward to down the stretch like we do in the NBA?
I wouldn’t change a thing about the system the NHL has in determining its champion. It’s a phenomenal league that’s parity manifests drama in places that no individual would ever expect to look. The NBA is relatively void of drama until the last few weeks of the playoffs (unless Houston’s persistent cries about officiating qualifies), but one defensible truth about the Association will always be that the best teams are guaranteed to be the ones that dictate how the story ends.
I’m purely playing Devil’s Advocate, and it’s all based on this one insane season, but there is no question that the majority of my sports interest in the immediate future has transitioned from the NHL to the NBA, primarily due to the onslaught that eliminated all of hockey’s heavy hitters in the opening round. Meanwhile, the top tier NBA teams cruised to round two, leaving us with what will surely be an exhilarating set of matchups down the stretch.
It’s only one year, but I think its fair to ask the question.
Can too much parity be a bad thing?