The Wysh List publishes every Friday.
The NHL's current playoff format needs to change. That much is clear. The players aren't keen on it, most of the coaches complain about it and the fans aren't enamored by it.
They took something that wasn't broken -- the 1-through-8 format -- and tried to fix it. In the process, they managed to devalue the NHL's elephantine 82-regular season for its best teams by bracketing the playoffs. The Tampa Bay Lightning could end the season with a share of the NHL record for most points in a season (132) and their reward will be to face either the second-best team in the entire NHL (Boston) or the fifth-best (Toronto) in the second round, rather than reseeding the field to give them a more favorable foe.