The minor playoff rule change that altered NHL history, including 4 Cup winners

During the 1986 offseason, a very strange thing happened in the NHL: The league made a rule change that nobody got all that upset about.

That was rare, even back then, because fans like to complain about things. But this change was so simple, and so obviously the right decision, that there really wasn’t anything to complain about. Or so we thought.

The rule had to do with the playoff format, and the league’s ongoing attempts to have one that made sense. Since 1974, when the league added a fourth round to the playoff tournament, the first round had always been shorter than the others. Originally it had been a three-game preliminary round, later increasing to five games. In 1986, the league decided to expand the first round to seven games, the same as the others. And everyone went “Sure, that makes sense”. Maybe a few of us complained that the extra games would make the season longer. But the extra playoff hockey, and the extra revenue it would generate, was an easy sell. And so the change was made, and then nobody thought of it again.

Until today. Or in my case, until a few weeks ago, when a reader named Andrew asked a question: How much does hockey history change if the first round had stayed best-of-five?

The answer, as it turns out, is “a lot”. So today, we’re going to go back to that decision from nearly 40 years ago, and work our way through an alternate version of NHL history that could – fair warning – make some of you sad.

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