>to add to this discussion of ties in ECAC play, i have this to add..
>Yes, ties are a fundamental part of hockey, in the regular season.  But
>why have a regular season if ties are taken as wins by the higher seeded
>team..
 
        I wasn't saying that should be done in general (it shouldn't;
it would be preferable to a shootout, but thank goodness no one's
proposing that), just as part of a specific scenario to compensate for
the advantage lost by a team when what should be a home game is played
at a neutral site for logistical purposes.  The idea was to make
eighth place means something just as it had with the Tuesday night
preliminary games, and in the process reduce the potential ice time
for a team that might be looking at four games in four days.
 
        The ECAC kind of opened the door for this sort of idea by
allowing ties in the first two games of the weekend playoff series.
 
>Its so pointles.  The point of the tournament, or playoffs, is to
>have any team in the playoffs have the possibility of winning it all.
>Furthermore, anyone who has witnessed sudden death overtime in the
>playoff of the stanley cup playoffs knows exactly how great it can be.
 
        Yes, and the ECAC does have sudden-death-to-the-death games in
Lake Placid (and see below).  But I find it a little pointless when
teams play overtime after overtime and the game doesn't neccessarily
decided the series.  For instance, people loved the 1-0 4OT
CC-Wisconsin game, but I couldn't help but think that after all that,
CC completed a two-game sweep with that game.  Geez, in the ECAC that
series would have ended after five minutes of overtime.  If Wisconsin
had pulled that out, would CC have been history?  No, they would have
done it again the next night.  The way I see it, you play overtime
until the cows come home if you absolutely *need* to determine a
winner.  The ECAC, with the 3-point series, has a way to conduct
multi-game playoffs without needing that.  I think the word we like to
use is "quirky".
 
>the other question, is what happens, in the ECAC first round (formally
>Q'finals)
 
        Hey, "quintafinals" starts with a Q. :-)
 
>if all three games end in a tie
 
        Only the first two can end in ties.  The third game of a
three-point series is winner-take-all, with arbitrarily many
sudden-death 20-minute overtimes, just like the games in Lake Placid
(except the consolation), and just like the one-game prelim used to
be.  The last time Princeton and Brown had a weekend playoff series,
game three went double overtime.
                                         John Whelan, Cornell '91
                                     Official Scorer/PA Announcer
                                        U of Utah Ice Hockey Club
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