It used to be so simple.
You played hard during the regular season in order to pile up the points and, hopefully, gain home-ice advantage during the playoffs.
On Thursday night, the Eastern Conference semi-final will begin, featuring the 102-points New York Rangers against the 98-points Ottawa Senators.
One would think, then, that they would be getting things ready at Madison Square Garden in New York. But no, preparations are under way at Canadian Tire Centre in Ottawa for the opening match of Round 2.
How this comes about is due to paperwork rather than numbers. The NHL insists on having four divisions make up its two conferences. In the Eastern Conference, the Senators finished second in the Atlantic Division, while the Rangers came fourth in the much-stronger Metropolitan Division. Second trumps fourth, meaning 102 is no longer a greater number than 98.
In the past, this almost certainly would have led to much grumbling and gnawing of the knuckles. "Home-ice advantage," after all, was considered a valuable commodity, almost as desirable as the "man advantage" that comes from the other side receiving a penalty.
Home ice meant you would have the crowd behind you – sometimes called "the seventh man" in hockey – and it also meant certain strategic advantages, first among them the home team's right to last change. No matter what line the visiting team might send out – from hot scoring to hot tempered – the home-team coach has the right to send out whatever line he thinks best matches, or overmatches, the other guy's.
Other slight benefits included a rule that insists that the visiting centre place his stick down first in the playoff circle, allowing the home centre to guess what the opposition plans are for the faceoff and, at times, allowing the home centre to have his stick in motion as the puck drops.
There was also the not-insignificant theory that screaming fans could influence officials, meaning more penalties for the visitors, more breaks for the home side.
But that was then and this is now. The Ottawa Senators, after all, are in the semi-finals because they defeated the Boston Bruins in six games, with three of Ottawa's four wins coming on the Bruins' ice.
In recent years, there has been much debate as to whether "home-ice advantage" has become a myth. Certainly, the results of a number of series would suggest it is not what it once was.
So far as line changes go, the only home-ice advantage in today's NHL may well be to the owner's bottom line.
Senators head coach Guy Boucher said Tuesday that home ice is not what "it used to be" in hockey and hasn't been now for the past several years.
While there was a time where smart matching of lines could pay dividends, that was in a time when teams would feature four dramatically different lines: the scoring line, a secondary line, a grinding line and a tough line. If you could get your skaters out against the other coach's sluggers, you had an instant advantage.
"That's not what the NHL is any more," Boucher said.
Instead, the top teams tend to roll four lines, all with speed and, often, with skill spread throughout. Boucher pointed out that the Rangers' Michael Grabner, a winger often on New York's fourth line, had 27 goals and 13 assists for 40 points this season.
"There is no fourth line any more," Boucher believes. "Your matchups matter, but not as much as they used to."
There was also the idiosyncrasies of various NHL rinks in the past – small ice surface in Boston, wonky boards in Buffalo, fast ice in Edmonton – but that is no longer the case in today's modern, uniform NHL rinks.
"Ice and boards" is the way Boucher described all NHL rinks now, with a red line splitting the surface in half.
"Guy Boucher's comments about rink size are correct," said Tim Swartz, a Simon Fraser University professor who teaches statistics and has a special interest in sports, "but most studies indicate that the home ice/field advantage is mostly attributed to officiating and less the other reasons that are often cited."
In 2011, Swartz and four colleagues published a paper, Ups And Downs: Team Performance In Best-Of-Seven Playoff Series, in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. Using data gathered from several NHL seasons, they found that the home advantage in the NHL was 54.5 per cent. In basketball, home-court advantage was noticeably higher at 60.5 per cent. When Swartz set out to verify his findings through an analysis of the 2016-17 NHL season, he found instant confirmation: of the 30 teams, only one had more road wins than home wins.
And that one team, sorry to report back to Ottawa, was the New York Rangers.
Roy MacGregor