The changes NHL should be looking at to fix its broken playoffs
And I was thinking about the last time the teams with the two best records faced off in the Stanley Cup Final, and do you have any idea when that was?
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It was, in fact, 36 years ago when first-seed Calgary defeated second-seed Montreal in 1989 in six games. Starting that season, the team with the NHL's best regular-season record has made the Cup Final just 10 times, while the runner-up club advanced that far just five times over the past 36 tournaments.
Indeed, the teams with the two best records reached the Cup semifinals (or conference final) the same time in just six of these past 36 tournaments. This may be partly happenstance — upsets do happen, as Coco Gauff, ousted in Wimbledon's first round, can attest — but this can also be attributed to the NHL's playoff bracket format that was adopted for the 2014 playoffs.
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