The Philadelphia Phillies can learn from the NHL playoffs
The chaos of the NHL postseason can provide a cross-sport lesson to the Philadelphia Phillies.
The Philadelphia Flyers have taken the top seed in the Eastern Conference as they begin their quest for a Stanley Cup, but it’s the team across the street who can actually learn something important from what’s happened so far in the NHL playoffs. Hey, Phillies, check out what a modified format can do for you.
The return of sports and the altered state that each league finds itself in has led to some wacky goings-on recently, none more so than the qualifying round of the NHL’s Stanley Cup Playoffs. With the league expanding the normal playoff field, we’ve just seen stunning victories from numerous teams who otherwise would have been on the golf course immediately after the end of the season.
Clubs like the Chicago Blackhawks and Montreal Canadiens (who we’ll be getting quite familiar with soon) used the best-of-5 round to their advantage to overcome heavy favorites. And the Arizona Coyotes were able to score their first playoff series victory in eight years. A good chunk of all this can be traced directly to the fact that, when you shorten the length of seasons and playoff series, it significantly narrows the gap between teams. As a result, also-rans and “good but not good enough” clubs find themselves with a golden opportunity to make some noise.
Enter the Phillies.
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If 2020 had been a 162-game MLB season, the Phillies were expected to jockey for at least a wild card spot, but none of us had championship expectations, at least realistically. But now that the MLB campaign has been slashed to less than 40% of its normal length AND the playoffs have been expanded, it’s time for the Phils to take advantage.
Granted, there are a couple other teams who fall into the same exact category as the Phillies, like the Reds and the Padres. These are squads who had a chance at being factors this year if things broke their way. Now, however, with the MLB regular season having been turned into a sprint and the postseason now a “get there and let’s see what happens” affair, these kinds of teams have an unexpected chance to make a huge run.
It remains to be seen if the upstart teams who just qualified for the Stanley Cup Playoffs have any more gas left in the tank. From this point forward, the NHL is basically “normal”, with a 16-team field and four rounds of best-of-7 hockey in the weeks ahead. Maybe the clubs who just pulled upsets will all be exposed and bounced from the playoffs shortly. But even if they are, they’ve taken advantage of the changes that their league made, and they’ve already gone deeper than anyone expected.
The fact that the pressure is off them can actually serve to make them even more dangerous going forward. I’d like to think that the Phillies can do the same sort of thing later this season, provided that they play well enough to get themselves into the playoffs. Once there, timely performances by their best players could end up taking this team a lot further than expected.
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Heck, the Flyers themselves can serve as an inspiration, as even the most dyed-in-the-wool Flyers fans didn’t think they’d run the table in the round-robin to capture the East’s top seed. It just goes to show that, with a small sample size, anything can happen. And for the Phillies, that could end up being a blessing in 2020.