Welcome Matt: NHL should follow the NBA's lead and create an in-season tournament
For years, I’ve struggled to understand all the in-season soccer competitions.
Europa League is just the B-pool for losers, right? The Cup Winners’ Cup seems awfully redundant. And I defy you to tell me what the Carabao Cup is, and I’d bet half of England couldn’t either.
But I must admit, I’ve come around on in-season cups and tournaments, and I applaud the NBA for trying one out next year.
Because I think the NHL should follow suit with an in-season tournament aimed at hockey’s most loyal fans: a Canada Cup.
The seven Canadian teams playing for a Canadian championship, not too dissimilar from the Voyageurs Cup Canadian championship, which Whitecaps FC has won two years running, but with fewer additional games.
With NHL seasons being as long as arduous as they are, not sure we could do separate games for our Canada Cup. That the season is so long and arduous is part of the reason I’d like something else to distract me, so let’s make this as seamless as possible, following the NBA model.
The NBA Cup is not adding too many games, it’s simply counting regular-season games as tournament games in the preliminary round.
A random draw will create three groups of six teams in each conference. Their games against each other in November will count in tournaments standings.
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From there, the six group winners plus two wild cards determined by record advance to the knockout round. The last four teams standing will play semi-finals and a final in Vegas, so seven extra games total.
For my Canada Cup, a designated game between Canadian teams would count as a tournament game. So each team would play six games against Canadian foes — three at home, three away — that count as tournament games.
The best two records could square off in April for the championship. That means two teams would play an 83rd game, which wouldn’t count in league standings, nor would the statistics.
Hockey is having its problems organizing best-on-best tournaments whether it’s the league/NHLPA owned World Cup or the Olympic tournament.
But the NHL needs to innovate, and it needs some sizzle over the long regular-season and those cold winter nights.
A Canada Cup would weight the Canadian seven games more heavily, give fans something else to follow and perhaps even create something that a struggling team — say…I don’t know…the Vancouver Canucks — could pursue in years where the Stanley Cup, or even the playoffs, look lost.