I'm afraid I have to weigh in against the ECAC Final Five as
well, and not just because it's changing something I'm comfortable
with.
 
Problems in Lake Placid:
        Yes, you're getting an extra team into the championships, but
under sort of upredictable circumstances.  With a Frozen Four, you
have four teams, and they're all playing both days.  How do you alot
tickets for a Final Five?  Fans of the 4/5 loser who bought three-game
ticket packages will get shafted, and thus fewer fans of the 4 or 5
seed will be willing to plan a big weekend trip.  In some sense you're
cutting the number of teams getting the full Lake Placid experience to
three rather than expanding it to five.  The 4 and 5 seeds each have a
chance of playing one game on Thursday, then sitting and watching the
rest of the weekend.  (But they'll be around, since none of the motels
in the area will let you cancel reservations on less than three days'
notice.)
        And given the expense of another night in Lake Placid, how
many 1-3 fans will come for the Thursday night game?  (I think if the
ECAC insists on expanding the championships, the Final Six suggestion
makes more sense, since a lot more people would attend the first day
to see two games, plus a Friday-Saturday-Sunday six-game tournament
makes a more appealing weekend package than a Thursday-Friday-Saturday
five-game tournament.)
        Also, as has been mentioned, Lake Placid will probably have
trouble handling the addition of one extra team, let alone two.  With
five or six teams, it makes more sense to move the tournament to
Albany.  (If they did, would the concession stands sell milk and
Pepsi?)
        Then there's the issue of what time the 4/5 winner plays on
Friday, which has plagued the WCHA in recent years.
 
Playoff Structure:
        In the old system, there was a strong incentive, beyond
seeding, to finish higher in the standings, wherever you were: tenth
place got you a ticket to the playoffs, eighth meant you hosted a
preliminary game, sixth meant you skipped the preliminary round
altogether, fourth meant home ice in the quarters, and second meant
your quarterfinal opponent would have played on Tuesday night.  (Plus
first place got you the automatic bye, which, as SLU in '96 and Brown
in '95 can tell you, is very important.  With a final five, the
placing atop the standings is important, with the top five getting
home ice, third place being assured of not playing a Thursday night
game in Placid and first knowing that if they make it to the Final
Five, they'll get the 4/5 loser in the semis.  Plus the 2nd and 4th
place teams are in a position to move up if there's an upset in the
quarters.  But positions 6-10 are all more or less the same, except
for the choice of quarterfinal opponents.  Even if the sixth place
team upsets the fifth, they still need two more upsets in the other
four series to escape the Thursday night game.  That's kind of a
remote incentive to finish sixth instead of seventh, and the
likelihood of it making a difference goes down as you move down in the
standings.  So with only seeding at stake, you might see the sort of
nonsense that goes on in Major League Baseball right now, with teams
wanting to finish lower down to secure a better first-round opponent.
(Suppose, for example, Brown is going to finish either ninth or tenth,
with Harvard in first and Cornell or Clarkson in second.  The Bears
would presumably be a lot happier going to Cambridge for a weekend
series than Ithaca or Potsdam, and so would have an incentive to
lose.)  From this point of view, the old ten-team format was ideal.
        If the ECAC really wanted to get rid of the Tuesday game, why
did they replace it with a Thursday night game in Lake Placid?  The
preliminary round was a handicap, but a team could avoid it by
finishing sixth or higher.  The 4/5 play-in game can affect anyone who
doesn't finish in the top three.  (A rule of thumb for me is that if
you're going to create handicaps in a tournament, do it to the teams
at the bottom who should be thankful they got in at all.  In other
words, put the byes in the first round.)
 
Aside:
        It sounds like one of the ECAC's motives was to make it easier
for the regular season champion to win the tournament title and gain
the "Clarkson/BU Rule" bye.  (Although as someone pointed out, the
final five makes it less likely that a lower seeded team not destined
for an at large bid will win the tournament and grab an extra berth
for the conference.)  As a big fan of conference goals over NC$$
goals, I just wanted to complain about the cynicism of the ECAC
tournament structure being driven by NC$$ tournament considerations.
 
Another aside:
        I'd assume this doesn't bode well for those rumors of someday
holding the ECAC women's tournament to Lake Placid concurrent to the
men's.
 
        Going to a Final Five seems like a bad way to fix the problems
associated with the old system (which I actually liked).  I'd say that
if the ECAC's top priority is getting rid of the Tuesday night games,
they should go back to an eight-team playoff, while if they really
want to let more teams go to the championships, they should let all
twelve teams into the playoffs and have a Final Six (and build some
dorms in Lake Placid).
                                        John Whelan, Cornell '91
                                        <[log in to unmask]>
        <http://www.cc.utah.edu/~jtw16960/jshock.html>
 
Cornell Men's Ice Hockey: Back-to-back ECAC and Ivy League Champions
 
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