May 26, 2013
Hockey East to expand playoff format starting with 2013-14 season
Posted on September 10, 2012 | in News | by Mike McMahonStarting next season, Hockey East will expand its playoff format, qualifying each of the league’s teams for the postseason tournament and eliminating a week from the regular season in order to accomodate for the extra postseason games, The Eagle Tribune has learned.
Currently, Hockey East is the only conference in the nation that does not qualify all of its teams, taking the top eight finishers from the 10-team league into tournament play and eliminating the bottom two teams in the standings.
Starting with the 2013-14 season when Notre Dame joins the conference, all 11 teams will qualify. The top five teams will receive first-round byes with the remaining six playing on the extra weekend to determine the final three opponents for the four quarterfinal series. When Connecticut joins in 2014-15, all 12 teams will qualify, with the top four teams receiving first-round byes and the bottom eight playing for entry into the quarterfinals.
Under the new format, teams seeded fifth through eighth in the regular season will host the first-round (once Connecticut becomes the 12th team in 2014-15). The added first-round games will either be a single-elimination or a best-of-3 series, a detail that has yet to be determined.
“We have to vet it a little more and take a vote,” Hockey East comissioner Joe Bertagna told The Eagle Tribune. “We have some time. We did agree ahead of time that there would be an extra round and we will have three weekends of playoffs, it’s just a matter of the details. We agreed ahead of time because we needed to make up the schedules.”
The playoff expansion came from a recommendation by the coaches and athletic directors.
“If each of the two rounds goes three games, you could have a team playing eight games over three weekends, which you would never see in the regular season,” Bertagna said. “We need to examine how this will affect the athletes and the facilities. This is also the first time we’ll be flying a team to a playoff round if Notre Dame is coming east or if we are sending a team out there, so there are cost ramifications to that as well. There are a lot of things still that have to be considered, but it’s a direction we’re moving in.”
The athletic directors meet next on Sept. 18.
Stupid stupid stupid
Why play the regular season?
I guess this is the only way UCONN will make the playoffs.
That’s probably why. It’s becoming kindergarten. Everyone gets an award. I can recall back in the early 1970s, when the New York Knicks were falling to third place in the NBA east — behind the Celtics and Buffalo Braves.
ABC-TV did not want a “Knickless playoff” so the NBA instituted the “Knick rule” — a weird best-of-three mini-series to guarantee they’d get in.
Now HE is trying to accomodate UConn? Wow.
Why play the regular season? For byes, for home ice, for national tournament hopes, etc…Lot’s of reasons…Almost every conference does this in major college basketball already and every other NCAA D1 conference does it in hockey.
Plus, more hockey is good and more playoff hockey is even better.
And if a team can’t beat the 11th and 12th team then they probably shouldn’t be moving on anyways.
We have trouble filling the seats for the first round now. There will be no one in the seats for the first round games. Stupid is as stupid does. Why play the regular season?
Long time fan
I don’t like this — a team could be 2-20 and get lucky for a week. And wind up knocking a great team off the NCAA tourney ladder.
Teams previously “on the bubble” of making the Hockey East tournament can now “mail it in” in the last two weeks, because they’re going to be playing in the desperation round.
Furthermore – attendance at these “playoffs” historically, has been woefully poor. There’s been an almost complete lack of fan interest in them. Perhaps Merrimack can sell out tiny Lawler but Conte, Agganis, etc. are empty tombs for these games.
If anything, they should REDUCE the Hockey East playoffs. Seven teams. The first place finisher gets a BYE and top seeding at the HE tourney at the Garden. 2-7, 3-6, 4-5 each play a best-of-three to get there.
Three, soon to be four bottom feeders don’t get in at all. A team that finishes that low in the table has no business moving on. The NCAA tourney is bad enough with courtesy bids for weak conferences. And as we saw two years ago, screwball enough to send its top regional seeds to venues outside of their regions, to avoid conference re-matches.
This isn’t “reform”, this makes things worse.