What could an NHL in-season tournament look like?
Tuesday saw the conclusion of the NBA’s second in-season tournament for “the NBA Cup,” with the Milwaukee Bucks capturing their first NBA Cup in a 97-81 victory.
It’s the NBA’s attempt at capturing the magic that soccer does with their several tournaments and championships in a season, while adjusting for the fact that it doesn’t have quite the same scale of success as soccer does.
As someone who has gotten more and more into soccer over the years, the idea of the in-season tournament last season intrigued me, because one of my favourite things about soccer is how many different trophies there are to win (and how much teams care about winning each one). It allows more than one team to finish their season as a “winner”, creates some strategy for teams to allocate their players for certain games of the season, and really cements the legacy of a team if they win more than one in a season. However, the NBA Cup hasn’t been met with quite the same success as what we’ve seen in soccer, although it has at least made mid-regular season games a bit more interesting.
Technically, the NHL has two trophies to win: the Stanley Cup and the Presidents’ Trophy. I’m pretty sure I don’t need to explain to you why the Stanley Cup is important to hockey, but the Presidents’ Trophy, if given better PR, could be looked at as what most European soccer teams compete for in their respective leagues, since they don’t have the traditional playoff format that North American sports do. However, with all focus being placed on the Stanley Cup, the Presidents’ Trophy is looked at as more of a curse these days.
But could there be the potential to be more? Obviously the NBA has set the blueprints in place for what the NHL could do, but hockey also has enough leagues outside of the NHL that it could potentially look towards European soccer for ideas. That said, there is much more competitiveness between leagues in soccer than hockey, so that alone will make it much more difficult.
With all that in mind, here’s four ideas I have for the NHL to potentially add more competition in-season, and potentially create a tournament at the same level as what soccer and the NBA has acheived.
Canadian/US Championships
Before we begin, I’d like everyone to take a moment and let out all of your “but the US championship is the Stanley Cup” comments. Yes, we know that Canada hasn’t won a Stanley Cup since 1993. Considering the nature of the fanbases for all of the Canadian teams, it’s honestly deserved.
Anyways, the idea I’m proposing here is similar to what the MLS has been doing with the Canadian Championship and the US Open Cup. For those of you that don’t know, they are tournaments that operate during the MLS regular season, where the three Canadian MLS teams (along with 8 Canadian Premier League teams and the Champions of League1 Ontario, BC and Quebec) and the 27 US MLS teams (along with teams from the USHL Championship & League One divisions, NISA, MLS Next Pro and various amateur clubs) play in separate knockout tournaments played throughout the season based on what country they play in.
The NHL actually offers a bit more competition for the concept of a Canadian championship, as there are 7 Canadian NHL teams compared to the 3 Canadian MLS teams. On top of that, all seven Canadian fanbases are hostile with each other to an impressive degree, meaning the concept of a Canadian championship could actually create some intrigue in the league. The US championship may need a bit more marketing, but there are still plenty of passionate American fanbases that would get into it.
Now, this tournament could work in two ways. You could do it similarly to the NBA in-season tournament, and have an initial group stage that counts towards the regular season as well as determining who qualifies for the knockout stage, and then go from there. Or, you could do it similarly to most football tournaments where the games are treated as separate from the NHL regular season.
There’s also another layer to this idea: would this tournament be NHL exclusive? As I mentioned before, the MLS isn’t the only league competing in the Canadian Championship and US Open Cup, so it certainly is possible for the NHL to allow leagues like the AHL and ECHL to compete as well. While hockey doesn’t have the competitiveness across multiple leagues for these kinds of tournaments like soccer does, the MLS operating without a relegation system does at least show that it is possible to still make this sort of tournament entertaining.
There are a few more complications, especially when AHL and ECHL teams are not their own franchises, but that could also provide a fun wrinkle to the tournament. Maybe the Chicago Blackhawks were eliminated early in their tournament, but their AHL affiliate, the Rockford IceHogs, are still in it, and they decide to send Connor Bedard to the minors to play for them and help their chances. That said, the NHL hates fun, and probably wouldn’t want to run the risk of seeing their teams lose to minor league teams (which, considering the luck-based nature of the sport, would certainly happen), but it could make it interesting.
Regardless, a tournament that just consisted of the seven Canadian NHL teams alone would be worth this idea. We saw how chaotic the all-Canadian division in the shortened 2020-21 season could get, now imagine that every year. And it also has the potential to create a few more rivalries amongst American teams as well, at least ones that aren’t forced by the NHL’s current divisional format.
Champions Hockey League
So this already exists in hockey. The Champions Hockey League was first launched in 2014-15, and has acted as a tournament for the top six European hockey leagues (excluding the KHL) and the 26 top clubs within those leagues, where they partake in a group stage to determine seeding for the playoffs, which is a two-game series with the winner being the team with the best combined score in the two games.
It acts similarly to the UEFA Champions League in European soccer, which has had a similar format, but on a much larger scale. Not only does it consist of 36 of the top teams across Europe’s top soccer leagues, but these leagues consist of a significantly better pool of teams and players, similar to the caliber of NHL teams. Of course, the CHL does not feature NHL teams, so the tournament is quite as prominent in hockey culture as the UCL is in soccer.
This is where my idea comes in: we let the NHL join the CHL. The top four teams in the NHL (either the top four teams in the regular season standings or the four Conference Finalist teams from the previous season) qualify for the tournament, and get a chance to compete in the tournament and play along side other European pro teams to win another trophy.
That said, this idea certainly has the most holes in it. For starters, the skill gap between the NHL teams and most European hockey teams is significantly greater than even the top European soccer teams have with the weakest qualifying teams in the UCL. The tournament would basically only be won by the NHL teams until either the hockey talent spread out to the European leagues (which would be bad for the quality of the NHL) or possibly see some competition from other leagues if the KHL joined once the political climate allows it.
There could be some instances where a team makes the Conference Finals and struggles the next year, like the 2020-21 Montreal Canadiens and New York Islanders or this season’s New York Rangers, and might actually lose against European teams, but even this year’s Rangers team would likely find a spark in this new league.
The other issue is travel. The thing that makes the CHL and the UCL work is that it consists of European teams, which means even travelling from country to country isn’t a huge burden on the players. A flight from Boston (the NHL’s most Northeastern city) and Geneva, Switzerland (the most Southwestern city that has a team from any of the current top-six European hockey leagues) is nearly a nine-hour flight, and that’s the minimum, as flights from Los Angeles to Finland can take anywhere between 15 and 18 hours. NHL teams would not be able to regularly fly to Europe mid-season to play random games here and there.
There are some possible solutions. The NHL has shown with the Global Series that they can send 4 teams out to Europe, so maybe you send them out there for a week and they can get all of their road CHL games in one swing, and vice-versa for the European teams. They could also just play the whole tournament at one host country at a random point of the season, either during the All-Star break or during the offseason/preseason, but you’re also cutting into valuable rest time for players on teams already playing a lot.
Ultimately, as much as I’d love to see a tournament on the scale of the UCL in hockey, it has a lot of cons and very few pros to be feasible. The only thing I could really see benefitting the NHL is continuing to grow the league in Europe, and also providing their own European players with an opportunity to play in front of their countries in more important games than the Global Series, while also scratching the itch the NHL has had with expanding to Europe.
In-season tournament
If the NBA can do it, why can’t the NHL? For those that don’t know, the NBA’s in-season tournament creates divisions unique to their already established divisions and allocates specific games in the early parts of the season to count towards both the regular season standings and the in-season tournament standings, and then it reaches a point in December where the teams that qualified for the playoffs play out those matchups to determine the winner.
The NBA has set out the blueprints for this kind of tournament, and has shown that it does work to some extent, although many fans are still confused by the process, and it has yet to truly achieve the hype of the in-season tournaments we see in soccer.
The biggest con with this idea is more of a sports politics issue. The NHL creating this kind of tournament would more or less show that they need to copy the ideas of other leagues to find success. While I doubt there would be any actual legal actions from the NBA for stealing their idea, it would not be a good look for the egos of the NHL, considering that they’re already a clear-cut fourth among the four major sports leagues in North America (and possibly even lower than the MLS at this point).
But at the same time, I’d imagine the NBA doing this tournament has at least generated some conversations amongst NHL executives, governors and owners about the possibility of doing their own tournament and what they’d do differently. It’s not the most interesting option on this list, but it’s certainly the most likely.
North American Professional Hockey Cup
So this idea isn’t too different from my first idea about the Canadian and US Championship tournaments. This one would also include all professional hockey teams from the major North American leagues (the NHL, AHL, and ECHL), and they’d compete in a domestic championship similar to what is seen in European football with the FA Cup, the DFB-Pokal or Copa del Rey.
For those unfamiliar with those tournaments, they are knockout tournaments that include somewhere between 64 to 725 professional soccer teams in their respective countries, and they compete in single knockout games, with the opponent determined by a draw, and slowly dwindle their way down to the final two teams that play for the championship. It allows lower-tier teams an opportunity to compete against teams in their countries’ top leagues, and while the trophy usually goes to one of those top teams, there are plenty of upsets along the way.
Of course, this tournament runs into the same problem that the Canadian/US Championships had if it included AHL and ECHL teams, that being that the teams are affiliated with NHL teams and the massive skill gap between the leagues. There could be obvious rules preventing affiliated clubs from playing each other for as long as possible to avoid the former problem, but with the latter, this would just be another tournament dominated by NHL teams, outside of the occasional upset (but those upsets and the ensuing embarrassment from NHL teams that lose to AHL and ECHL teams would be a big reason why the NHL would avoid those tournaments in the first place).
The only other possible solution would be including Canadian Hockey League, United States Hockey League and NCAA teams, but that’s an issue in and of itself. Having a teams filled with teenagers and young adults that are still seeing their bodies develop play against some of the toughest players and teams in hockey would be an injury nightmare waiting to happen, not to mention there being potential for legitimate legal ramifications for violence between a legal adult and a legal child. The only upside to this idea would be the fact that it would create an opportunity for NHL teams to scout players in those leagues and see how they handle themselves against actual NHL teams, but the cons far outweigh the pros here.
Ultimately, there are plenty of fun ideas for the NHL to add some spice to their regular season and create a tournament similar to what the NBA is trying to establish and what European soccer has managed to do for over a century. However, each idea comes with its kinks that would need to be worked out, and with no established precedent and history in those tournaments, it may be hard to get players to invest in these games.
But maybe there might be something fun and unique here.
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