Last night I read an article over on Yahoo Sports. The author advocated expanding the current playoff system to ten teams per conference. That way teams like the Captials, who had a terrible first half of the season but are now one of the hottest teams in the league, wouldn't get left out. In my opinion, this is a TERRIBLE idea. The NHL already allows more than half its teams to enter the playoffs, and if you can't make the top 8 teams in your conference you really don't deserve to be in the playoffs. All an expansion will do will draw out an already lengthy playoff season (starts in April, ends in June) and water down the competition. Yes, it's sad that an electrifying player like Alexander Ovechkin won't get a chance to shine on the NHL's biggest stage (and he really needs more exposure because the NHL likes to pretend that Crosby is the only player that exists in the league) but the Caps couldn't win early, and now they're paying for it. Sad, but that's the way these things work. Now if the NHL wants to shake up the playoffs a bit to ensure the best hockey, they should revert to their old school playoff format. In the 70's and 80's they would take the playoff teams and seed them 1 through 16 no matter what conference they were from. So sometimes teams from the same conference, or even the same division made it to the Stanley Cup finals, but it also allowed the stronger conference to send more teams if that's how it shook out. The NHL is the only major sports league to adopt this type of playoff system (I only did like 30 seconds of research on this) and it should seriously consider going back to it (though that is unlikely to happen with Gary Bettman as commissioner).
Here is the original Yahoo article
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