The NHL should seed the playoffs 1-16 and scrap the division bracket
The current bracket rewards the crime of playing in a weak division. A team can finish with the fourth-best record in the conference and draw a soft first round because their neighbours were bad, while a genuinely better team two divisions over runs into a buzzsaw in round one. That is backwards. The regular season is 82 games of evidence, and then the format throws half of it away to protect a bracket that exists mostly for television tidiness. Seed one through sixteen by points, let the standings mean what they claim to mean, and stop punishing teams for the sins of their division rivals. Yes, you lose some guaranteed rivalry series early. You also stop crowning teams that got a manufactured easy road. [SI's case for scrapping the bracket](https://www.si.com/nhl/playoff-format-awful-needs-to-change-heres-how) makes the same point: the standings already rank everyone. Use them.