League-Wide Wild Card Format Example 3
This final example will include 32 teams. The additional team, Quebec, will be added to the Atlantic Division to fit in with its natural rivals (Montreal, Boston, Buffalo), thus creating what
would normally be an extremely awkward 9/6/9/8 split of teams between the Divisions:
The Atlantic Division now has an extra automatic playoff spot, and only 1 potential Wild Card spot, just like the Pacific in the previous example. That makes the number of automatic spots 13, and Wild Card spots just 3. Since the Atlantic Division can only have 5 total teams make the playoffs, #15 Florida misses the playoffs, and #17 Washington makes the playoffs instead:
Once again, there is some fairness imbalance in some of the middle matchups (#4 vs. #8, #10 vs. #12, #5 vs. #9):
In this round, since Minnesota won the crossover series, all the Division brackets now have an even number of teams, so there are no crossovers. When this happens, it tends to cause unfair matchups to occur, and sure enough, we have #2 vs. #5, #7 vs. #16, and #3 vs. #8.
With only one team remaining from each Division, the third round matchups are within-Conference:
Overall, the format is highly specialized, geared towards handling any distribution of teams between Divisions in a relatively easy way to understand. This may be of interest if it becomes more challenging to have equal numbers of teams between the Divisions without breaking up historical and geographical rivalries, or making Divisions span 3 time zones or more (likely if no expansion or moves to cities in the Central time zone). Otherwise, the fairness issues are likely too problematic for this format to be viable.
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