Boston led the league in wins and points when the season was halted, but now loses home-ice advantage and must play a round-robin to determine the top seed.
The good news for the Bruins is, it sure looks like they’re going to play hockey again this season. The NHL’s best team before the shutdown will try to win a Stanley Cup after it.
Qualifying round (Best-of-5): Pittsburgh vs. Montreal, Carolina vs. N. Y. Rangers, N. Y. Islanders vs. Florida, Toronto vs. Columbus
Qualifying round (Best-of-5): Edmonton vs. Chicago, Nashville vs. Arizona, Vancouver vs. Minnesota, Calgary vs. Winnipeg
The bad news is that having the best record through March 12 doesn’t have the same weight they might have assumed it would.
The Bruins were the best team in hockey by every measurable factor – most wins, most points, highest percentage of available points earned, goal differential – before COVID-19 arrived. That didn’t mean much Tuesday when the NHL announced its quirky plan to restart. All it got them was a bye in the first round of the expanded 24-team playoffs and the most anti-climactic Presidents’ Trophy ever.
In each conference the top four teams are guaranteed a spot in the round of 16 (called the first round), while the other eight play each other in best-of-five series to advance to the first round. The four teams with byes play three games, one each against the other teams. In the East that means the Bruins will face Tampa Bay, Washington and Philadelphia. The record in those three games will determine seeds No. 1 through 4. In other words, the Flyers – who had 89 points in 69 games – could end up higher than Boston, who had 100 points in 70 games.
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said he wanted to reward the top teams with passage into the round of 16, but didn’t want it’s best teams to be disadvantaged in that first round because they’d be playing teams who had been playing elimination contests. So the league created a format where the top four teams would play meaningful games too.
“We’ve considered lots of options. By getting a bye, they’re going to be facing a team that just came out of a competitive series, and the concern was they needed to have some competition that might not put them at risk in terms of the playoffs but would give them an opportunity to play some real games, and that was the thinking that went into this,” Bettman said. “That’s really the answer. They needed some games that mattered to some extent in order to be coming against a team that just played a competitive series.
