NHL
MAY 12, 2011
The NHL Playoffs Have Gone Nuts
As High Seeds Beat Low Ones, Home Teams Get Routed and Scrubs Beat Stars, We Search for Answers
By KEVIN CLARK
In a postseason that should be dominated by names like Alexander Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby, the NHL's newest playoff star last week was a 24-year-old grinder named Steve Downie, who after scoring just 32 points all season for the Tampa Bay Lightning had tallied 12 in just 10 playoff games.
"I wouldn't read too much into it," Downie said of his success with a shrug. "It might be done tomorrow."
Steve Downie of the Lightning celebrates a goal against the Penguins in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference quarterfinals.
This is what life is like in this year's NHL playoffs. Since this marathon began on April 13, the sport seems to have entered a new dimension where the traditional rhythms and traditions of a sports postseason seem to have been dipped in tequila.
In the NCAA men's basketball tournament, which is known for Cinderella stories, the higher seed has won 71% of the games in the last decade. In this year's NHL playoffs, the higher seeds have won just 52% of the time. Other sports constants have been zapped, too: home teams have won 45% of their games, compared with 70% in this year's NBA playoffs. And no lead, no matter how large, seems safe: In the first 71 years of the modern NHL playoffs, only five teams managed to erase a 3-0 series deficit to force a Game 7. Thursday night, when the surging Detroit Red Wings take on the San Jose Sharks, it will be the second such comeback this year.
Highly paid stars have given up the stage to an expanding gallery of regular Joes. Among the NHL's top 15 players in jersey sales, just six made it to the second round. That's a smaller number than the NBA has in the current series between the Boston Celtics and Miami Heat.
Asked to sum up the action so far, former Bruins and Islanders coach and executive Mike Milbury settled on "wacky" and "out of control."
"There's a frenzy and a passion that defies all logical planning," he says.
Hockey insiders say there's no one single reason for this topsy-turvy situation. There are dozens. Former Detroit Red Wings legend Steve Yzerman, now the Lightning's general manager, theorizes that all the upsets stem from the NHL's relatively new salary cap, which restricts teams from becoming as dominant as they were in decades past. The result, he says, is that there's "very little difference between the No. 1 and No. 8 seed."
Yzerman also said the slew of new arenas built in the last 15 years, which tend to have fewer quirks, have reduced home-ice advantage. As a player, Yzerman remembered being bothered by the small ice surface at the old Boston Garden, which helped the purposely oversized Bruins clog the ice and disrupt faster teams.
Steven Stamkos, the Lightning's 21-year-old star, attributes the near lack of home-ice advantage to the fact that visiting teams can always control a game by hunkering down on defense. He points to Game 3 and Game 4 of the first-round series against Pittsburgh when the Lightning came out "all jacked up" in front of its home fans. This, he said, actually made them more vulnerable to defenders who played further back in the defensive zone and let the home team run itself out of position. "There's just a simplicity on the road," Stamkos said.
Others say the difference with the NHL playoffs is that players tend to do things they wouldn't do in ordinary games. The Lightning, for instance, took down Washington's vaunted offense by taking the rather extreme (and undoubtedly painful) approach of throwing their bodies in front of pucks. The team averaged 21 of these blocked shots a game in the playoffs, up from 14 in the regular season.
Milbury, now an NBC analyst, cites the case of Daniel and Henrik Sedin, Vancouver's high-scoring twins who shredded opposing defenses this season with their quick decision-making, great skating and near telepathy on the ice. When the pace picked up in the playoffs and the Sedins were pressured, he says, they found less time to make the instinctive decisions they'd thrived on before the playoffs.
Washington's Jason Arnott, a 17-year veteran, said the playoffs have been trending wacky since 2005, when new rules were instituted aimed at promoting flow and finesse. Since then, he said, "everyone plays out of their element. It's about blocked shots, face-offs." Luck can play a bigger role and a team's top stars have to make adjustments. "They have to realize they do the little things," he said.
"It's a different game," said Capitals defenseman Scott Hannan. "You have these long series and it comes down to things like bad bounces."
From a TV ratings standpoint, the NHL's unpredictability doesn't seem to be hurting. Coverage of playoff games so far this year on Versus are up 8% according to Nielsen. NBC's first-round coverage posted the highest numbers since 2004.
One group that hasn't welcomed this development: oddsmakers. Adam Young, the head oddsmaker at Bodog, an online sports book, said that hockey has become the hardest sport to set lines for, and that this has been doubly true lately.
This year, he said, after the Chicago Blackhawks went down 3-0 to Vancouver, the odds against them ballooned to 150-1, drawing an unexpected rush of wagers. The Blackhawks later came back to force a Game 7 and barely lost the game in overtime—nearly giving Young and other oddsmakers a collective heart attack. "It was nerve-wracking," he said.
Write to Kevin Clark at
kevin.clark@wsj.com
