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Report: CHL considering March Madness-type bracket for Memorial Cup format

Mathieu Belanger / REUTERS

The Memorial Cup is a celebration of and a fantastic exhibition for Canadian major junior hockey. The format of the tournament has never made much sense, though, and the CHL is considering changes.

Since 1983, the Memorial Cup tournament has included the three clubs that won their respective league (the WHL, OHL, and QMJHL champions all get a berth in the tournament) and a fourth team that hosts the tournament. As you might imagine, the host team often gets torched.

The tournament also features a round-robin stage to determine the teams that will play in the eventual Memorial Cup Final. Generally, only one team is eliminated during the round-robin stage, reducing the stakes.

According to a translated report from La Presse (full translation here, courtesy Pro Hockey Talk), the CHL is seriously exploring a 'revitalization' of the Memorial Cup format:

This vision [implies having] more than four teams in contention to play more playoff games to generate interest and disseminate more games to attract more viewers.

“Whenever the content increases, it’s great for us. What is good with March Madness in the United States is that it lasts three weeks and several rivalries are born,” says [Scott Moore], president of Sportsnet.

Neate Sager of Yahoo! Sports' junior hockey blog thinks that the format changes will be a reality in the medium term, and suggests that a March Madness-style tournament could solve a whole host of issues:

[La Presse reporter] Gabriel Beland goes on to point out that Moore described having a suspect host team - hello there, 2013 Saskatoon Blades - as a "negative effect" on the tournament's attractiveness. The other part of that is the event has grown at the corporate level to the point that only a handful of teams have the resources to host, which creates another inequity.

None of this would happen for a few seasons, but the tendency is that the rights holder eventually gets what it wants. Hypothetically, a 16-team single-elimination tournament offers 15 games, each one with real stakes. That is an improvement over an eight- or nine-game touranment that doesn't really start until its second weekend.

Pivoting off of Sager's proposed 15-game structure, Jason Brough of Pro Hockey Talk discusses his dream scenario for how the teams competing would be selected:

We’ll add to that hypothetical. Let’s say the top two teams from each of the three leagues (WHL, OHL, QMJHL) get automatic bids for reaching their respective postseason championship series, plus nine more teams receive at-large bids as selected by a committee (controversy potential!), plus one bid for the host city. Voila, 16 teams. Set the bracket and play.

Whether this happens or not, it's clear that this type of format would've served the CHL better last season, particularly when one considers the relative inequality of, say, the OHL's Eastern and Western Conferences. The OHL's stronger Western Conference supplied half of the teams at the 2014 Memorial Cup, but probably had 4 of the top-10 major junior teams in the country.

[H/T Pro Hockey Talk]

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