At their annual meeting on May 16, the athletic directors of the ECAC will be voting on a proposal to change the current playoff format to allow all 12 men’s hockey teams into the postseason. To avoid making the ECAC even more of a laughing stock of a conference, I urge Harvard Athletic Director Bill Cleary ‘56 and all of the other headmen to please vote no.

The proposal, first reported in the Dartmouth Sports Weekly (nice piece of journalism, Sherzer), will increase the number of teams in the tournament from 10 to all 12, with six winners of best-of-three first round series advancing to Lake Placid. The bottom four remaining seeds would participate in play-in games on Friday for the right to face the top-two seeds in the semifinals on Saturday. The finals then would be on Sunday.

This is a fairly substantial departure from the current format, in which the top ten regular season teams get whittled down to a Final Five at Lake Placid after the first round. The fourth and fifth seeds at Lake Placid have a play-in game on Thursday with the semis on Friday and the ECAC Championship game on Saturday.

Harvard coach Mark Mazzoleni declined to comment and Cleary was, as usual, unavailable, but Dartmouth coach Bob Gaudet advocated for the expansion to USCHO.com.

“Generally speaking, more teams experiencing the playoffs and Lake Placid is positive,” he said. “It’s nice for the kids to have playoff experience and to know that, even if a particular team goes through a tough stretch during the regular season with injuries or other problems, they still have a chance to make it a really successful season.”

As nice as Gaudet’s statement sounds, from a competitive standpoint, this is a bad idea.

First, allowing everyone in the playoffs reduces the regular season to merely a battle for seeding in the tournament. The only thing up for grabs in 22 conference games is home ice for the first round and the right to maul the bottom of the conference in the first round. The regular season took a big hit last year when the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament was removed. Now, it is further devalued by removing the penalty for failing to perform.

There is no real reason to admit the eleventh and twelfth place teams into the tournament. While Gaudet waxes eloquently about the tough breaks involved in missing the playoffs (until this year the Big Green was one of the teams in that race), the ECAC already provides a tremendous opportunity for students to experience the postseason by admitting 10 teams.