After a four month sprint we’re wrapping up the NHL season. This year was a bit different, rather than having a cohesive league it was split up by geography. Really it felt like four different leagues that would later take the best and challenge the other leagues in the playoffs. It was nearly a throwback feel, back to the days of the Original Six. This breakup was born out of necessity, COVID rules between Canada and the United States were too strict to allow teams to constantly travel across the border that was closed to everyone else. Granted, American tv networks showing NHL games basically ignore the Canadian teams. So it’s made watching every team play a little more difficult than in years past. Of course you could have just rotated through and likely have seen the same teams play a game that was also played a week ago or even the night before.
Somehow in the early days of the NHL the league survived with only six team – Boston, New York, Detroit, Chicago, Toronto, and Montreal. Essentially dividing the teams into three geographic regions – eastern Canada, northeastern United States, and the rust belt. It’s a very small number considering most leagues don’t dare to start without at least eight teams. Somehow the league survived with just these six teams for 25 years until they first had expansion teams. After watching games this year, I have no idea how the league survived and attracted fans year in and year out. Six teams playing 70 games against each other for 25 years, every team had to be your rival, otherwise I don’t see how the league could have lasted. This year I was struggling to stay interested midway through a 56 game schedule between eight teams. I can only watch the Wild play the Blues and Golden Knights so many times. The Stanley Cup rematch becoming an intra-division game with the Stars and Lightning lost its appeal to me after the third time they played.
This season we got a taste of what it was like watching games back before the 1967 expansion. After going though this, I’m even more impressed the NHL has lasted as long as it has. Of course back then the games were mostly covered in newspapers, only local games were televised or covered on the radio, and most importantly games were attended in person. The last one is likely the most important reason it survived, NHL stadiums aren’t that big, they generally hold under 20,000 people. Put games in a city that has millions of people and that’s likely what kept the games interesting for fans. This year was almost the opposite, if fans could attend they were attending in very limited numbers. But watching games streaming or on tv was incredibly easy. If you wanted, you could have watched nearly every game. It’s one thing to hear or read about Boston playing New York 14 times a year It’s another thing to see the same teams play 7 times in a season.
The NHL has always had a thing for division teams playing each other in the first round of the playoffs. It was the format from the mid 70s to the mid 90s. It’s been that way again since the 2013-2014 season, though in a slightly different format. Division matchups are still king in the first round of the playoffs. Coincidentally this year the total number of games played against your division can add up to 70 – the same number of regular season games from the Original Six days. Is it too much? I don’t think so, playoff hockey hits different. Playing the first games against your division just seems right. It’s going to take until June before any inter-division games happen this year, but it gives that “old school hockey” feel. And we all love old school hockey (yeah, like Eddie Shore).
As I write this there’s only 4 spots left for playoff hockey. 9 teams still fighting for those last spots in 3 divisions. It’s been a throwback year, and like a true millennial I lost interest in the old for a while. The throwback year was fun, for one year. Really though, I can’t wait to see some new teams play each other and some gritty playoff hockey.