Greg writes:
>I propose that the ECAC throw out the Championship Tournament and
>play single game semis and a final on successive weekends at the
>better seed's building.
 
Sounds like a good proposal, but I see a couple of problems with it:
 
1.   It would give a very big, and possibly undeserved, home-ice advantage
     to the higher-seeded teams.  Except in the cases where one team is
     particularly dominant (like the '89 Harvard or '90 Colgate teams),
     there is usually not much of a gap between the ECAC's top teams.  In
     each of the last two seasons, the top three teams in the league have
     all finished within a single point of each other, which makes it hard
     to make the case for one team having earned a home-ice spot all the way
     through the tournament.  Also, when the top teams finish so close in
     the standings to each other, it may very well be the case that the
     league's best team is not the one that finished first during the
     regular season.  That was the case last season, when Harvard wound up
     atop the league standings but (as was later proved) St. Lawrence was
     clearly the better team.  Generally, by the time you get to a Phinal
     Phour, the pretenders to the throne have pretty much been weeded out,
     and it makes more sense to decide the issue at a neutral site, where
     all four of what should be the league's best teams can slug it out on
     an equal footing.
 
2.   While, as Greg points out, playing at the better seed's building would
     guarantee sell-outs and local interest in the games, it would badly
     hurt the chances of the lower-seeded team's fans to see "their guys" in
     action.  Considering that the ECAC has no league-wide television con-
     tract, this is a big concern.  A good-sized neutral site like Boston
     Garden can easily handle, say, a couple thousand fans from each of the
     Phinal Phour teams, but that's not the case for most of the ECAC rinks.
     Under the proposed scenario, last season's championship game between
     St. Lawrence and Cornell would have taken place at Appleton Arena,
     which is one of the larger rinks in the league but still holds only
     3200.  Tickets for this game would be in short supply for Cornell fans,
     and if some arrangement were put in place to make more tickets avail-
     able for the Big Red followers, then the St. Lawrence fans would
     suffer.  It seems fairer to hold these games at a neutral site -- and
     leave home ice for the quarterfinals as a reward for finishing higher
     up in the standings.
--
Bill Fenwick
Cornell '86 and probably '94
LET'S GO RED!!
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