Quote:
Originally Posted by dino7c
And if the league wants "more talent" in the playoffs longer they should change the format back to 1 vs 8 ect. so top teams aren't playing each other and a middle of the pack team like the Oilers doesn't get the Kings in round one.
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The playoff format has never been about ‘more talent’. The league went to a divisional playoff format in 1981, along with an unbalanced schedule, because they found out the hard way that fans don't care about matchups against bad teams from random distant cities. The divisional matchups were intended to breed local rivalries, and for a long time that worked.
But nothing works forever, and after seeing Montreal vs. Boston in the playoffs for the 239th time, or Calgary vs. Vancouver for the 127th, the league began to feel the pinch again. So they went to conference-wide playoffs to bring in new matchups (and the first year they did it, they were rewarded with yet another Montreal-Boston series, but them's the breaks). That experiment might not have lasted long, but they had also reorganized the league into six divisions and it was impossible to have a 16-team playoff with a divisional bracket.
As soon as the league expanded beyond 30 teams, the reason for the six-division alignment disappeared, and they went back to four divisions with (largely) divisional playoffs for the same reasons they adopted that system back in the 80s.
Playoffs have never been about putting talented players on TV in the later rounds. They are about putting bums in high-priced seats, and the most reliable way to do that is to match up teams whose fans already know and hate each other.