On the Shape of the First Postseason

Ten matchdays remain in the First Season Ever. At the conclusion of Matchday 38, the top eight teams will enter the First Postseason Ever, and HockayA sport no one asked for but everyone needed. will, for the first time, have to decide something it has never decided before.

Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. has been preparing for that moment since before there were games to prepare for. Le Council had a plan. Le Council is writing today because Le Council is changing it.

This advisory will explain why. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. asks the reader's patience with the explanation, because the explanation is the reason, and Le Council is of the view that a ruling without its reasoning is merely an instruction. Le Council issues rulings. Le Council prefers not to issue instructions.

The Season, As It Stands

Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. does not, as a rule, editorialize on the standings. The standings are a record, and a record speaks for itself. Le Council will, on this occasion, draw attention to a single feature of the record, because the feature is load-bearing for everything that follows.

Through Matchday 28, four points separate first place from eighth. A single point separates the eighth seed from the ninth. The final ticket into the postseason is, at the time of this writing, not held. It is contested. It has been contested for some weeks. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. expects it to remain contested until Matchday 38 has been played in full, and possibly until the final horn of it.

Win = 2pts, OT/SO Loss = 1pt, Regulation Loss = 0pts. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. notes for completeness that the ten teams below the line are themselves separated by only six points, and that one of the teams above it sits in a postseason place with a negative goal differential. Le Council declines to call this parity, as parity is a word that invites argument. Le Council will say only that the season has not narrowed. It has tightened.

What the Data Did

A season is not a single number. It is a path, and Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. has watched all twenty paths cross one another for twenty-eight matchdays. Several of them are worth naming, because Le Council named them internally long before electing to name them here, and because each one informed the decision this advisory exists to announce.

The Mumbai MonsoonsMumbai led the league for seven consecutive matchdays, Matchday 11 through Matchday 17, after first reaching the summit on Matchday 9 and returning to it once more on Matchday 22. The Monsoons are, at the time of this writing, in tenth. They are outside the postseason. A team can lead HockayA sport no one asked for but everyone needed. for the better part of a month and watch the playoffs from beyond the eighth seed. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. records this without satisfaction. Le Council records it because it is the single clearest fact in Le Council's possession, and Le Council found that it could not stop thinking about it.

The Prague PhantomsPrague did the opposite of dramatic. They reached first place as early as Matchday 7 and were rarely far from it again—near the top for weeks at a stretch, through a single midseason dip to sixth and back, until the summit simply came to them. They lead now, at forty points. The Phantoms rarely had a bad week. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. has come to regard this as its own kind of remarkable.

The Guadalajara GatosGuadalajara sat sixteenth on Matchday 5. They are second now, with the best goal differential of any contender. The Rimini RinklersRimini sat among the bottom three for the opening weeks; they are fourth now—a postseason place held with a negative goal differential, earned by a refusal, which Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. finds almost procedural, to lose in regulation. Five of their defeats reached overtime, and each one yielded a point. The Perth PyresPerth held first place across the back half of May and sit third. The McMurdo MonolithsMcMurdo Station led on Matchdays 4, 5, and 10, and remain in a postseason place, accompanied, as ever, by their attendance figures.

And then there are the Anchorage AurorasAnchorage, who will enter the season's final stretch in twentieth, where they have spent most of it. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. notes "most," and not "all": the Auroras climbed as high as eighteenth on Matchday 9 before settling, from Matchday 10 onward, into last. Le Council mentions this not unkindly, and mentions it beside a second fact it has been unable to reconcile with the first. On Matchday 17, in Vladivostok, the Anchorage AurorasAnchorage scored ten goals—the first double-digit game in the history of HockayA sport no one asked for but everyone needed.. On Matchday 24, they scored twelve. Two of the four double-digit performances the league has ever produced belong to the team in last place, including the first of them, and the largest. On Matchday 28, as the underdog, they beat the Montréal MaplesMontréal by two. Le Council declines to draw a conclusion. Le Council records it, sets it beside the standings, and invites the reader to make of it what they will.

The pattern across all of this is not difficult to state. This season has been decided in inches, repeatedly, by every team, against every other team. Leads have evaporated. Cellars have been escaped. The order of things has been provisional from the opening horn. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. assembled this picture not as a retrospective but as evidence, because Le Council had a decision in front of it, and the picture is what made the decision.

On the Format Le Council Had Planned

Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. will be direct, as directness is the only honest posture available when one is reversing oneself.

The First Postseason was to be a single-elimination bracket. Top eight, drawn at random, one game per round, win or go home—Quarterfinals, Semifinals, Final, Rest Day. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. designed this format before the First Season existed, on the basis of the information Le Council possessed at the time, which was, Le Council now concedes, very little. The format was clean. It was decisive. It fit on a single page. Le Council was fond of it.

Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. possesses considerably more information now. Twenty-eight matchdays of it. And the information says, plainly, that single-elimination would resolve the closest competition HockayA sport no one asked for but everyone needed. has ever staged by the least reliable means available to it.

Consider what one game can hold. A single bounce off the boards. A single visit to The SixthThe dimension behind the penalty box. Players who enter may return changed. that returns a player altered at the wrong moment. A single Aurora Tuesday over the wrong arena. Across thirty-eight matchdays, these even out—that is what a season is, a machine for letting variance cancel itself. Across one game, they do not even out. They simply decide. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. looked at a table in which four points separate the top eight teams and concluded that to settle it with single elimination would be to spend an entire season earning the right to a coin-flip.

Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. does not wish to crown a coin-flip. Le Council wishes to crown a team.

The Revised Format

Effective for the First Postseason, Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. rules as follows.

The Quarterfinals and Semifinals will be decided as best-of-3 series. A team must win twice to advance. One bad period no longer ends a season; it costs a game, and a game can be answered. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. considers this the minimum a season this close has earned.

The Final remains the Final. A single match. Three periods of one hour each. The roughly three-hour event it was always going to be, on the night it was always going to be held. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. considered extending the Final and elected not to. The Final is not a series. The Final is the place a season arrives. Le Council is of the view that it should be decided in one sitting, by two teams that have already proven, twice each, in two rounds, that they belong in it. The Final remains the Final.

The bracket is still drawn. The top eight still qualify, in the order Matchday 38 leaves them. Series will alternate between the participating arenas, with their respective modifiers in full effect—Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. will not be intervening on behalf of, or against, The Stone OperaPrague Phantoms · 11,111 capacity · Encore, El Rincón PerdidoGuadalajara Gatos · 21,758 capacity · Nine Lives, The Red FurnacePerth Pyres · 16,849 capacity · Melt, or any other building whose team plays its way into the draw. The postseason calendar expands to accommodate the additional games. Le Council has adjusted the calendar accordingly. The exact dates of the later rounds remain GlacifiedHidden by The Almighty Ice. Or by Le Council. Or by both. until the field is set, for the simple reason that Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. does not yet know who is in it.

The Rest Day that follows the Final remains sacrosanct and unchanged. On that day there will be silence. There always is.

Closing

Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. does not enjoy reversing a decision it made in public. Le Council enjoys, considerably less, the prospect of a season like this one ending on a bounce. Of the two discomforts, Le Council has chosen the smaller, and Le Council is at peace with the choice.

The teams have spent twenty-eight matchdays proving the table cannot be trusted to settle. They have earned a postseason that does not settle on the first bad night either. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. is giving them one.

Ten matchdays remain to decide who enters it. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. advises calm—except, of course, when it comes to watching the back half of the First Season Ever.

If you have opinions about the format, Discord remains the appropriate venue. Le CouncilThe governing body of Hockay and Unexplained Ice Phenomena. is not reading those conversations. Le Council is, however, aware that several of you predicted this change before Le Council announced it, and Le Council finds this, as it has come to find a great many things this season, interesting.