DANKOCHIK’S DRAFTINGS: Regular seasons should matter

There’s no doubt that the NFL has become the dominant sports league, at least in North America.

The traditional view of a “big four” of the NHL, MLB, NBA and NFL is now completely outdated, thanks in large part to the NFL lapping the field.

In my opinion, one ingredient in the NFL’s “secret sauce” is ensuring their regular season actually matters. Any single loss or stretch of bad play in the league could be disastrous for a team and even if they recover, it makes their path in the playoffs much tougher.

This is especially bad in hockey, as not only does regular season excellence not give any big reward given a lower seed’s potential to find a great goalie, but it’s actually seen as a negative by some fans. Going into the playoffs with the best regular season record isn’t seen as a an accomplishment by many, but a curse to be overcome.

Every hockey player and coach I talk to downplays regular season excellence, noting “it doesn’t matter until the playoffs.” While that statement is truthful, what does it say to the fan who might buy a ticket to a regular season game?

Baseball is the sport that has had some of the roughest changes. The adding more playoff teams does not make any sense for a sport that has 162 games in a season. When only four teams in each conference made the playoffs, there was a case to be made for having such a long season to cut out all sub-par teams. Now that more teams make it, what is the point of the 162 game season?

If a baseball league embraced a tight summer schedule, with 20 games and each team playing once or twice per week I think it might actually compete for the top spot in sports. It would be interesting to see at least, with high drama in every at bat.

In the NBA, adding in the play-in game has helped prevent tanking, but other changes in the game have meant most teams just do not take the regular season seriously. The NBA is turning into the NHL, where the playoff and regular season products are becoming more and more different.

All these seasons include those extra games not for competitive balance, or to improve the fan experience, but to just make more money.

Even the NFL has hurt their product in smaller ways, adding a mostly useless extra game and extra playoff team.

I’ve been happy to see more local leagues put more emphasis on rewarding regular season excellence. The Manitoba Junior Hockey League has a great set-up, with less than half the teams in the league making the playoffs. Regular season seeding really does matter. I’d rather see a good team miss the playoffs than a bad team make the playoffs.

In the Manitoba Colleges Athletic Association, instead of schools rotating hosting championships, this year the top seeds in basketball and volleyball will get to host the final in their home gyms, and the last-place team will not make the playoffs this year.

This is a massive change, and makes those early-season match-ups

In the Capital Region Junior Hockey League, with the addition of the La Broquerie Habs, the league has moved to giving only one team a first-round bye, ensuring a weak start to the season can’t be made up in the second half and still get the all-valuable bye.

The division system in the Hanover Tache Junior Hockey has also helped make regular season games matter more, even as every team in the league makes the playoffs.

A single team in each division will get a bye, rewarding dominating your home division.

If other top leagues want to catch up to the NFL, they need to take a page out of our local leagues, to ensure the games played in the regular season matter, and aren’t just calendar fillers.