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Originally Posted by Barnet Flame
I agree with you.
However, in other sports (club soccer) the Cup competitions and the league competitions are self contained in their own right.
In the NHL, the season is the means by which you make it to the Cup competition. So you strategise accordingly. God help any GM or Head Coach who takes risks with players potentially affecting their health in the post season in a run to win the President’s Trophy.
The race to win the league is there to be sacrificed if necessary for the Cup that everybody wants.
But it’s still a heck of an achievement but unfortunately falls in to the nice to have category.
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I have actually wished for a while that they'd move to a system where they basically just have two seasons, the regular season and the cup season after that. So essentially the same as now, but everybody "makes the playoffs", and the presidents trophy would be a legit championship trophy.
Would work well with a 32 team league. That makes for a nice playoff bracket, and in the regular season you could play every team home and away plus your division rivals two more times. That's a 76 game season. Then add 4-7 playoff games and everyone gets at least 80-83 games per season even if they don't win playoff rounds.
So because everyone gets playoffs games, you could also easily shorten the regular season.
If you used the regular season for cup seeding, that would also give a real for all teams to play until the end, because every position would count.
It would also give the fans something to look forward to, even if their team is already dropping out of competition for division, conference or league championship: there's always another season. Upset even one team in the playoffs and you'd feel a lot better about your season overall.