The List

If you're Gary Bettman tonight, the image to the left might be how you're feeling about this play-in round that ended tonight with the Columbus Blue Jackets ousting the Toronto Maple Leafs from the tournament entirely with a 3-2 series win on the strength of a Game Five 3-0 shutout win. All of the league's marketable young stars to whom the NHL has hitched its wagon are now sitting on the sidelines as the remaining sixteen teams will determine who the 2020 NHL Stanley Champions are.

Imagine being the commissioner of the NHL and having the brightest stars not on the ice during a time where your sport is the gold star for managing the pandemic. While the eight teams who won their respective series absolutely deserve to be in the playoffs for their efforts, the NHL won't get highlight-reel material from likes of Crosby, McDavid, and Matthews this postseason because none of them will be there.

Here is the list of eight stars the NHL won't having playing.

Arguably, that list could also include names like Mark Scheifele, Aleksander Barkov, Mika Zibanejad, Matt Duchene, Jonathan Huberdeau, Nikolaj Ehlers, Artemi Panarin, William Nylander, Zach Parise, Kyle Connor, and Ryan Johansen. There are a lot of great hockey players who lost three games in a week, and I haven't even mentioned defenders or goalies.

I'm going on record that I'm not a fan of these five-game play-in series, and my hope is that this is the last we'll see of them. When half of the league's 32 teams already make the playoffs, there's no need to add eight more for fun.

As for the teams that lost, some may not have made the playoffs while others likely would have still lost in the first round of the playoffs. However, the regular season accomplishments of these teams to make the playoffs should not be erased by a hot goalie or team who put together one good week of hockey.

Let's hope that players like Ovechkin, Marchessault, Kucherov, Giroux, Pastrnak, Tarasenko, Seguin, and MacKinnon can light up the scoreboards as the big names on the top teams while players like Svechnikov, Petterson, Eberle, and Hall can bring some highlight-reel goals for the NHL. If there is a plus, there might be more people talking about players they had never heard of one week ago.

That might be the silver lining for the NHL after watching some of its biggest stars book flights out of Edmonton and Toronto one week after the playoffs began.

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!