“It’s the stupidest thing ever.” This was Washington Capitals’ forward Daniel Winnik’s review in 2017 of the NHL’s still (somewhat) new playoff format. Three seasons earlier, along with realigning its divisions, the NHL had abandoned it’s previous, simple playoff arrangement. For 20 years, the top eight teams from each conference qualified for the playoffs, with the first-placed team playing the eighth-placed team, the second-placed team played the seventh, and so on. “I don’t know why it’s not one to eight,” Winnik said. “I don’t know why we got away from that.” A lot of people are still asking the same question.

On Sunday, as the NHL locked in its first Western conference playoff matchup, confirming that the Dallas Stars will face the Colorado Avalanche, some fans took to online forums to both celebrate and lament. “Anybody else hate the divisional format? I truly think both of these teams are legit contenders,” one user posted to the r/hockey subreddit under a link announcing the matchup. “Pretty sure literally everyone does,” another responded. Indeed, it seems unfair that one of the top teams in the West will be eliminated so soon into the postseason. Worse, is that, thanks in part to the playoff format, fans have seen this matchup coming for ages – a predictability that is supposed to build anticipation, but has instead become annoying.

Related: Alex Ovechkin is now the NHL’s greatest goalscorer. It’s debatable what else he is

Here’s how the NHL playoffs work now: Since 2014, the top three teams from each NHL division qualify for the postseason, plus the next two highest-placed teams by points, regardless of their division, as wildcard entrants. In the first round, each of the top divisional seeds plays a wildcard team, with the team with the most points playing the wildcard team with the least. Meanwhile, the second- and third-placed teams from each division face off.

When it was announced for the 2014 season, the revamped playoff rearrangement was just one piece of a broader league-wide realignment. The NHL redesigned its divisions and conferences to align more closely with time zone boundaries to both reduce travel and make TV schedules better for fans. “We played a majority of games outside the Eastern time zone, and our next generation of fans wanted to be able to watch and listen. But so many of our games started too late,” John Davidson, president of the Columbus Blue Jackets – who moved from the Eastern Conference to the Western Conference during the realignment – said when the changes were approved.

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman also felt the realignment would create more intense rivalries, because it meant that teams began to play inside their division and conference more frequently – three or four times each – with the remainder of the games against teams from the other conference. On the eve of the 2014 Stanley Cup final, Bettman declared the effort a mission accomplished. “I think the entire realignment this season has been received overwhelmingly in a positive way,” Bettman said at a 2014 press conference. “The rivalries have been great,” he said, speaking of that year’s postseason – the first under the new format.

Whether or not divisional or conference rivalries have intensified since the realignment is a point of debate. What’s clearer is that the playoff matchups in an ever-expanding league remain in some cases painfully predictable.

The LA Kings of recent years are a good example. This postseason will be the fourth year in a row that LA will face the Edmonton Oilers in the first round of the playoffs. The Oilers have won the past three meetings. Forget rivalry, this is more like a recurring nightmare for Kings fans – and one they could see coming for months. It’s a similar, though less pronounced, issue for the Toronto Maple Leafs, who’ve faced the Boston Bruins three times in the first round since 2018 and the Tampa Bay Lightning twice. “You see LA-Edmonton every year in the first round. Is that really good for the league?” Winnipeg forward Gabriel Vilardi asked reporters in March. “You can’t make rivalries. They just happen naturally. That’s my opinion.”

What to do? The solution to all this might not be a fresh overhaul of the playoff format itself, but of the regular-season points system. Some have suggested that the NHL should adopt the 3-2-1 points system it used in the Four Nations tournament earlier this year – that is, three points for a win, two for an overtime win or shootout win, and one for an overtime or shootout loss (zero for a loss in regulation). Currently, the NHL awards two points for any win and one point for a loss in overtime or a shootout. The theory is that the 3-2-1 system would incentivize teams to win more games in regulation, thereby shifting the overall standings, and rewarding teams that might have otherwise not made the postseason. One poll in 2024 showed 78.7% of NHL fans want the change. Yet, if the 3-2-1 points system had been applied this season, the Oilers and Kings still would have likely played one another in the first round. And the Leafs would not have played the Senators (as they will), but instead, uh, the Lightning.

For now, Bettman doesn’t think the format needs a rethink. “I’m pretty dug in on this,” he said in March. “I like exactly what we have and if you look at the races that we’re having for the regular season, playoffs have started already,” Bettman added, referring to the fact that some teams have been relatively certain of the team they’ll face in the first round for many weeks. Bettman referred to this inevitability as the NHL’s “play-in tournament”, referring to the NBA’s extra games that determine the final teams to make the postseason. But, even by his own account, Bettman should consider a change. When the current playoff format was introduced, Bettman said it would stand for at least three years “barring another relocation or expansion” – neither of which, he noted, were being considered. Since then, the NHL has seen one team relocate and two new join. It might be time.

Playoff predictions

Western Conference final Las Vegas v Winnipeg

Eastern Conference final Toronto v Washington

Stanley Cup final Winnipeg v Toronto

If this proves to be the matchup, it would be fitting for a year in which Canada has (re)defined itself so much via hockey that a Canadian team finally ends the nation’s 35-year Cup drought. Things have aligned well for the Leafs this season, but the hockey gods are also endlessly cruel, so if this unbelievable Cup Final should occur, the safe bet would be with the Jets.

“He’s definitely a very, very, very good player,” the Washington Capitals’ director of amateur scouting, Ross Mahoney, told reporters on the night of the NHL entry draft in June 2004. He was talking about Alex Ovechkin, who the team picked first overall that night. “How good will he be?” Mahoney asked. “Time will tell.” Now, nearly 21 years later, time has had its say. On Sunday afternoon in a game against the New York Islanders, Ovechkin scored his 895th goal, passing Wayne Gretzky’s all-time NHL scoring record, a tally that had stood since 29 March 1999 and that few believed would ever be broken.

Had things been slightly different in 2004, we might have been having this conversation a year ago. The NHL season after Ovechkin’s draft – the 2004-05 campaign – never happened, replaced instead by a long dispute between the league and the players’ union. Ovechkin bided his time in Russia, where he played 37 games with Dynamo Moscow. Finally, in autumn of 2005, he stepped on to NHL ice for Washington and, as Mahoney – and everyone else – expected by that time, he proved immediately to be a very good player. Ovechkin scored two goals in his first game, the first of an eventual 52 on the season (alongside 54 assists).

That rookie year tally included what is still regarded as one of the most impressive, and improbable, goals of all time. During a game against the Phoenix Coyotes, Ovechkin somehow scored while sliding along the ice on his back, facing away from the Coyotes net. “It was unbelievable,” Auston Matthews, who was eight at the time and at the game that night, later recalled. “Nobody really cheered, they really couldn’t get their heads wrapped around what just happened. It was pretty crazy.” Also not cheering was the coach standing behind the Coyotes’ bench that night: Wayne Gretzky.

When Ovechkin helped bring the Stanley Cup to Washington in 2018, the first in the team’s history, he fulfilled the expectations that had followed him for his 12 NHL seasons to that point. And it certainly seemed like he knew it. Nobody celebrated with the Cup quite like Ovi did – nor, frankly, has anyone done it with the same reckless abandon since. The Cup also meant that Ovechkin solidified himself among the greats – as a man capable of scoring, but also winning. On that count, until Ovi began to close in on Gretzky’s goal record, he was most closely compared to Sidney Crosby, who entered the NHL a season after Ovechkin. The two have never been exactly stylistically identical, yet their points totals have tracked along eerily similar trajectories for the entirety of their careers. But until the Caps’ Cup, Crosby – with three championships – was usually regarded as the more accomplished player overall. While Ovechkin’s goal record may not fully balance things out, it seems fitting that, with it, the two players will likely be regarded in the long run as equals – the best examples of what the NHL has to offer.

Related: Et tu, Wayne: Gretzky’s legacy in Canada takes hit over 4 Nations snub

On the ice, anyway. Elsewhere, Ovechkin’s astonishing playing career may always be accompanied by an asterisk: a note about his unsavory, full-throated support for Vladimir Putin. In 2017, Ovechkin launched Putin Team, a social movement that, as he wrote in an Instagram post at the time, “unites people who are proud of their country and want to make Russia stronger.” It went on to say that Putin Team was for people who valued Putin’s “trust in and respect for his people, his fairness [and] righteousness, and the fact that he really cares.” Ovechkin recruited other Russian athletes to the cause, including Crosby’s longtime Pittsburgh Penguins teammate, Evgeny Malkin. In a separate post at the time, Ovechkin wrote that “I never hid my relationship with [Putin], always openly supported him.” Indeed, Ovechkin stood alongside Putin in his Instagram profile photo.

In 2022, after Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, Ovechkin was less open about the closeness of that relationship, but fell well short of criticizing the Russian leader. Unlike fellow Russian NHLer Artemi Panarin – who said, among other things, that Putin “no longer understands what’s right and what’s wrong” – Ovechkin only said that he didn’t want to see anyone get hurt or killed in the conflict and that he hoped “it was going to be over and we are going to be living in a good world.” As for whether he still supported Putin, Ovechkin said, “Well, he’s my president, but [like] I said, I’m not in politics, I’m an athlete.”

Obviously, that’s never really been true for Ovechkin, but it also feels increasingly that it can’t be true for anyone. When Ovi started out, perhaps athletes could more easily separate their sport persona with the world beyond the game. But over the course of the two decades of Ovechkin’s career, the political and cultural environment has changed significantly, as has the broad perspective of past actions. Now, nobody is free from scrutiny, and whatever dotted line that some athletes once tried to draw between politics from sports in the past, is now gone. Even Gretzky isn’t immune. Where for decades Gretzky was considered untouchable, his own recent close association with a controversial politician, Donald Trump, has undermined his greatness in the eyes of many of his fellow Canadians. The Great One is now, as they say, The Great Once.

Ovechkin is still great, as far as the hockey goes. That’s undeniable. But just as on his draft day only time could tell how great a player he’d be, history will now dictate how great he is ultimately considered to have been. When he talked to reporters after the game in Phoenix in 2006 where Ovechkin scored his greatest goal, Gretzky said it was “pretty nice.” “He’s a phenomenal player ... He deserves all the accolades he’s getting.” That’s still true. But by the same token, he will deserve everything else, too.