The Vancouver Canucks haven’t had regular season games matter quite like this in a good, long while.

For a few years running, the Canucks were often so far out of the playoff picture that all the ‘stretch run’ really represented to them was a chance to lower their draft lottery odds. Then, last year in 2023/24, as the team made a triumphant upswing, they were essentially locked into a playoff position from the first month of the season onward, which meant the tail-end of the regular season was just about jockeying for seeding.

Not so in 2024/25, however. Here we are, down to the final nine games of the season, and the Canucks are in the midst of a dramatic battle for the last wild card spot in the West. That has meant that every single game, and every single point, has really mattered for a couple weeks running now, and will continue to matter right down to the wire.

All of which dovetails nicely into a discussion that has been ongoing in league circles of late, and that’s a discussion about changes to the playoff format.

Specifically, the notion of introducing a ‘play-in’ tournament at the end of the regular season, in which a small handful of teams directly compete for the final one or two spots in the actual playoffs.

There are several reasons why this topic has come up, not the least of which is the fact that the NBA now includes a play-in tournament on their yearly schedule. The “2025 SoFi NBA Play-In Tournament” gets going on April 15, and features the teams seeded 7^th-10^th in each of the NBA’s two conferences competing for the seventh and eighth seed in each conference.

The NBA Play-Ins have proven popular, and that’s saying something for a sport whose popularity already heavily outpaces that of the NHL.

But there are also some hockey-specific reasons why some are thinking about play-ins. Tournaments, in general, are hot right now on the heels of the wildly successful 4 Nations Face-Off.

There is also the recent memory of the play-in format that was necessitated by the pandemic-truncated circumstances of the 2019/20 season. For those who don’t recall, the Canucks won their best-of-five play-in series with the Minnesota Wild that year, which led them into an actual first round victory against the St. Louis Blues before bowing out to the Vegas Golden Knights.

Whatever one thought of the format itself, most have fond memories of the extended postseason drama from within ‘the bubble.’

And then there’s the argument of the size of the league. The NHL already has 32 teams, which is two more than the NBA’s 30. As it stands now, a full half of the league – 16 teams – do not get to experience any postseason action in any given season. That’s a lot of teams, and it may be getting worse, because all indications are that the NHL is not done expanding quite yet. A recent report suggested that the NHL’s ideal future size is 36 teams. With no play-in series, that would mean 20 teams having their years conclude suddenly with the end of the regular season.

All of which has led to lots of chatter about the introduction of a play-in series.

Now, for those who are diametrically opposed to the idea, we have good news. Your opinion is in line with that of Commissioner Gary Bettman. Speaking after the recent GM meetings, Bettman told reporters that he was strongly against the concept, saying “I’m pretty dug in on this, 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. We’re in our play-in tournament.”

The bad news, however, is that the idea has already progressed enough to the point that Bettman felt the need to make a public denial. That suggests it’s something he’s already hearing suggested fairly frequently in his circles.

But, as much as we hate to agree with the most-booed man in professional sports, Bettman is absolutely correct on this one, and the Vancouver Canucks’ current circumstances are the proof in the pudding.

Right now, the Canucks are in a three-horse race for the final wild card spot in the West, trailing the Blues by four points (with a game in hand) and two points ahead of the Calgary Flames (who have two games in hand.) Should the Minnesota Wild continue to struggle, it could very well become a four-horse race – and no matter what, there will still only be two spots available at the end of the day.

These circumstances are what has led to each and every Canucks game being fraught with tension and drama for these past couple of weeks. Heck, when was the last time you remember being excited about a matchup with the Columbus Blue Jackets in late March? And yet, that’s what we got this week, and what a matchup it was!

Introduce a play-in tournament, and all that drama disappears. If we were to borrow the NBA’s format, then all four of the Wild, Blues, Canucks, and Flames would already essentially be locked in to place for the year-end play-in tournament, and would just be jockeying for seeding within that tournament right now. The pressure of outright missing the playoffs would be absent. The value of those proverbial ‘four-point’ games would be drastically lessened.

And for what?

All a play-in tournament would do would be to replace several weeks of tension-filled regular season jockeying with a small handful of games that ultimately serve the same purpose. That doesn’t sound like a ‘less is more’ situation, it sounds like a ‘less is less.’

It would also do a great disservice to the regular season itself. With 82 games each year, it’s already hard to feel like every single one of them matters. And yet, when the circumstances land just right, as they have for the Canucks this season, we quickly learn that every regular season game does, in fact, matter. And that’s the way it should be.

Imagine the difference in feeling if all these little wins and losses actually didn’t amount to much difference. If the Canucks blowing a 3-0 lead against Columbus really didn’t matter for much other than changing the seeding in a play-in tournament. Would that really feel right?

The 2024/25 Canucks might, in fact, be the best argument against a play-in tournament we’ve seen in a while, and we can state the reason in pretty blunt terms: if the Canucks don’t earn a playoff spot the old-fashioned way this year, the reason will be because they don’t deserve one. The late-season push is what it is, but it’s only been made necessary because of the Canucks underperforming at other times of the year.

The Canucks are suffering the consequences of a poor overall regular season, and their only current way of salvaging it is through a dramatic run to end that same regular season. Which is the way it should be.

To have the regular season become less consequential should not be the goal. The regular season is as consequential for the Canucks right now as it has ever been, and the entertainment-based results speak for themselves.