St. Louis Blues Return Unofficially Official, But Keep Waiting

The St. Louis Blues know they will see the ice again in 2020. Even with that step, there are still hurdles to jump.

St. Louis Blues fans finally got their wish. They now know that their team will have the ability to defend their 2018-19 Stanley Cup championship.

On May 22, 2020, the NHLPA – the player’s association – voted to accept the league’s proposal of a 24 team playoff. So, we now know there will be hockey and we will get to finish the 2019-20 season. At some point.

While this news is exciting, it is not the final hurdle by any means. It is more of a first step toward solidifying things.

For lack of a better analogy, this is putting the water in the jello mix. Eventually things will firm up, but you’ll have to wait.

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What we know for sure is that the playoff format will feature 24 teams. The play-in round – don’t call it the opening round or heaven help you – will be a best-of-five series.

Like the NCAA tournament, the fifth seed will play the 12th seed in each conference. The sixth seed will play the 11th and seven and eight will face one another.

Everything else is still up in the air.

The likelihood is that the top four seeds will play games each other so that the bottom seeds don’t catch fire and come in against ice cold teams that are supposed to be getting some sort of advantage by being better in the regular season.

If the vote passes, there are still details to be worked out with the NHL. Players are voting on the format @FriedgeHNIC reported last night: Having the top-four teams per conference play each other, while the other 16 participate in a play-in round.
— Chris Johnston (@reporterchris) May 22, 2020

Even that has pitfalls.

If St. Louis, Colorado, Vegas and Dallas play one another, will they essentially be exhibition games to warm up? Will seeding be on the line since Colorado was basically riding the Blues bumper when the world stopped?

That scenario would benefit the Avalanche, but imagine if Boston lost the top seed in the Eastern Conference. While those in St. Louis would not shed a tear, it does seem unfair to present a scenario where the Bruins would not be the top seed in their conference when they were eight points up on Tampa and 10 points better than Washington.

Nevertheless, those ideas still have to be ironed out. So does the format beyond that opening play-in round.

There have been rumblings of making the first round of the playoffs best-of-five too. I cannot fathom why other than trying to have two best-of-fives and two best-of-sevens in each conference. Other than evenness, there seems to be no real cause. The only other reason would be to speed up the playoffs a tad, since there has been no decision on the 2020 Draft or when the 2020-21 season will be pushed back to.

Another thing that will need to be decided on, whether by negotiation or decree by the league, is where these games will be held. The NHL, and likely several other sports, have gone back to the pod city idea.

They still do not know if they want to go with two cities or four cities. Some recent reports had the league looking at eight or nine cities, but I believe that was the NHL seeing who was viable, not actually looking at having games in nine cities.

Lastly, as excited as we are to know there will be hockey, we still do not know when. Despite many players saying they could be ready in about three weeks, there was a reports that the playoffs might not begin until late July.

We are already at the end of May and you do need time to recall European players and get permission for Canadian players to cross the border, or vice versa if a Canadian city hosts, but late July just seems a bit late. I had figured second week of July at the latest.

So, it is exciting, but still troubling times. It’s a step in the right direction, but several fights remain.

Chris Kerber suggested that unless there is significant pushback by the broadcast partners, broadcasters may have to call games off a monitor in a different location. That works in some sports, but hockey would not really be one.

On top of that, who gets practice time at what time and does that throw players off that are used to having morning skates and suddenly have to practice at 2 pm? Time will tell.

Anthony Daniels used to say George Lucas was a master of making his actors hurry up and wait. The NHL is now taking a page from that book since they’ve got us all excited, but making us wait even longer for it to actually happen.