Hockey players are conditioned to think that winning the Stanley Cup means going through the best teams to be the best team.
That doesn’t mean they are blind to some of the inequalities of the NHL’s current divisional playoff format. An Associated Press/Canadian Press survey of NHLPA representatives from all 31 teams shows that almost half favor changing the format — and most of those support going back to seeding the Eastern and Western conferences 1 through 8, the structure that was used from 1994-2013.
This is the sixth playoffs where each division’s top three teams and a wild card are bracketed together with no reseeding by round.