Merrill Park Superstar

With the Stanley Cup Playoffs about to begin, I decided to have a look at the NHL standings to see who is where. Since I rarely watch hockey during the regular season — I’ll try to catch the outdoor game, because it’s awesome — the teams I have the greatest knowledge of are fairly local — I’ve seen quite a bit of the Flyers, and a few Devils and Rangers games. It seems like every time I watch the Flyers, they end up in a shootout, and then they lose in that shootout. Now, my limited knowledge of the National Hockey League is not so limited that I think that I’ll be seeing any shootouts in the playoffs. To the contrary, I am fully aware that the 2007-08 NHL season has seen its last shootout (unless Phoenix and Anaheim go to one, I’m writing this while those teams are still playing). And I think that’s an important factor to examine as it relates to the playoffs. It is possible, after all, that those extra points teams pick up in shootouts are the difference between a run for the Cup and an early tee time.

Before I list the adjusted standings, here are the actual conference standings. First, the Eastern Conference:

And now the Western Conference:

I’ve italicized the playoff teams in each set of standings, and the teams in bold are the top three seeds in their conference by virtue of their regular season division championships. Now we’ll have a look at the adjusted standings. For these, I simply cut the value of each shootout victory in half, essentially giving it the same value as ties used to have. Overtime losses, which encompass shootout losses already, maintained the same one-point value they actually hold. And then it’s the standard two points for a regulation win.

Eastern Conference:

Western Conference:

Well, the playoff picture doesn’t change that much in the Western Conference — the last three teams in sort of shuffle around a bit — but there’s a huge change in the Eastern Conference seedings. The Carolina Hurricanes go from narrowly missing the playoffs to being guaranteed the #3 seed in the post-season tournament. That’s a hell of a jump. The Washington Capitols, in turn, fall to the #7 seed. The New York Rangers also decline heavily, going from the #5 seed to the #8 seed. The Flyers, who are notably a bad shootout team, would’ve ended up as the third best team in the conference, and the best non-division champion in the Eastern Conference, with shootouts are removed from the equation.

It’s also pretty interesting to see how far the Edmonton Oilers plummeted without the help of shootouts. That they went from a borderline playoff team to the second-worst team in the conference based solely on a glorified skills competition, as some call it, is something that bears mentioning.

Still, I wasn’t sure what all of this meant, so I went back and had a look at the playoff teams/contenders of the previous two years, and how they stacked up without the aid of shootouts. The team’s actual playoff seed, where applicable, is next to its name in parentheses. Here’s 2006-07:

Again, no big changes in the Western Conference, but plenty in the East. The Lightning and Islanders were rewarded handsomely for not being able to put their opponents away in regulation or an overtime period, leapfrogging four possibly more deserving teams — including our friends the Hurricanes again — for the conference’s final two playoff berths. It didn’t do either team much good when they got bounced in the first round, but that’s not surprising given what we’ve learned here.

But the most interesting thing here has to be that the current defender of the Prince of Wales Trophy was the number one team during the regular season when points accumulated in shootouts were thrown out.

Here are the readjusted 2005-06 standings:

I guess the big thing here is that if it weren’t for shootouts, the Edmonton Oilers wouldn’t have found themselves in the Stanley Cup Finals.

Well, that’s pretty big, actually.

So what does all of this tell us? Not a whole lot, I guess. One year it picked a conference champion, the year before it would’ve excluded a different eventual conference champion.

Still, if I were the Hurricanes, I’d probably be a little aggravated.