Unlike last summer’s playoffs, NHL’s new temporary divisions may play to Hurricanes’ favor
Not since the draft lottery ping-pong balls bounced their way in the spring of 2018, delivering Andrei Svechnikov to their doorstep like an unwrapped gift, have the Carolina Hurricanes enjoyed such good fortune at the hands of the NHL.
When the league restarts next month -- if all goes as planned -- with a 56-game season played entirely within four separate divisions, the Hurricanes appear all but certain to land not with their usual foes in the Metropolitan Division, the 1927 Yankees of NHL groupings, but in a much softer spot.
Because the NHL has to put all seven Canadian teams in the same division because repeated border crossings just aren’t feasible at this point in the COVID-19 pandemic, the other divisions have been redrawn. Based on the most recent and likely final proposal, the Hurricanes would avoid not only their usual division opponents like the Washington Capitals and Philadelphia Flyers and so on but the newly added Boston Bruins as well, and instead join a Central-Southeast mashup that has two of the NHL’s worst teams, the Chicago Blackhawks and Detroit Red Wings.
Since teams will only play within their divisions right through the first two rounds of the playoffs, that essentially makes the Hurricanes one of six teams for four playoffs spots instead of one of eight -- and they’ll feel pretty good about their chances of finishing ahead of the Florida Panthers and Nashville Predators, too. Then it comes down to measuring themselves against the Columbus Blue Jackets, Dallas Stars and Tampa Bay Lightning.
The Hurricanes were willing to play in either division, and there are certainly pluses and minuses to both -- the travel would be dramatically easier in the northeast, and from their perspective they’re a playoff team no matter where and who they play -- but from a competitive standpoint, playing 16 games against the Blackhawks and Red Wings is going to make it an easier slog, physically and mentally.
All of this remains predicated on the Canadian government allowing the seven Canadian teams to resume play, which is likely but not assured, and everything still needs to be finalized between the NHL and NHLPA, which is never assured. There are a thousand issues beyond the division setup that still need to be negotiated, from the basic (how many players can come to training camp?) to the complex (if there’s a “taxi squad” of reserve players, how would they fit into the salary-cap system?). The NHL has two important conference calls scheduled for Sunday to dig deeper.
But as things stand, it would be a tremendous break, one that creates a much larger margin of error for the Hurricanes to make the playoffs, dramatically so.
This wasn’t always the case. It’s actually been very much up in the air over the past month. The Hurricanes have bounced back and forth, swapping spots again and again with the Pittsburgh Penguins as the NHL has tried to find the right balance between competitive balance, geography, traditional rivals and television appeal.
In the end, it didn’t make TV sense to break up the Flyers and Penguins, to the Hurricanes’ benefit. All those years Hurricanes fans have complained about being overlooked by NBC? It worked out in their favor this time.
It’s a dramatic change from last spring, when the NHL not only expanded the playoffs -- something that would have ended the Hurricanes’ decade-long playoff drought in any number of years previously -- but forced the first no-doubt Carolina playoff team in a decade to play an extra round. That it ended up being against the New York Rangers, who the Hurricanes hadn’t beaten since the Clinton Administration, was just the cherry on top.
The Hurricanes exorcised their Rangers demons only to run up against the Bruins, again, but they may have managed to avoid both of them in this ad hoc redivisioning, as well as the Capitals, who figure to be substantially improved under Peter Laviolette.
A season after the NHL created a playoff format that threw a huge roadblock in the Hurricanes’ way, the league has created a regular-season format that, on paper at least, plays to their advantage. The Hurricanes haven’t made the playoffs in three consecutive seasons since they were the Hartford Whalers. They may never have a better chance to do it here than this abbreviated season.
This story was originally published December 20, 2020 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Unlike last summer’s playoffs, NHL’s new temporary divisions may play to Hurricanes’ favor."
