Talk:2007 Stanley Cup playoffs/Archive 2

message: **That would imply that the Ducks are from the East and the Rangers are from the West when they aren't. --Howard the Duck 10:02, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: NBC's has Anaheim in the Conference Finals, with no re-ordering for first round and home ice on top. CBS's is pretty much the same, except they did re-order for the first round (but they put in lines). No telling until the next round who they put on top or whether they re-order. Comrade Tux 03:01, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: NBC indicates how I would do it (although I like the style of ours a bit better than theirs). As I noted, it is common in a bracket setting for teams to move to their line without regard to making sure the higher-seeded team enjoys the "top" line. Once matchups are fixed (as in this situaiton), that seems perfectly acceptable to me, particularly in the NHL context, when the higher-seeded team always enjoys home advantage. 76.10.24.245 03:04, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: For a third one, Versus' bracket is the same as the one currently on the page, except they don't have lines connecting anything. Comrade Tux 03:07, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

text: I think we should wait on how NBC does it right after the Detroit-SJ series is over. Then whatever they do, we should follow it. How about the NHL? How do they display their brackets? Or we can get rid ot the lines so we use the home ice on top convention. --Howard the Duck 03:10, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: If the NHL has a bracket, I can't find it - a search for "playoff bracket" on their website doesn't return anything relevant. Comrade Tux 03:14, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The NHL does not do a bracket on its website or anywhere else that I have seen. This is just a visual representation of what is going on in the NHL Playoffs, a convenient way of seeing, at a glance, what has happened in the tournament without having to sift through the textual descriptions of each series and piecing together the juxtapositions of them. There's nothing "official." If you look through the debate on the talk page from a year ago, some people were arguing that should be a rationale to have no bracket at all; I disagree, since it does perform a useful function. However, I would advance Anaheim in the current bracket to the bottom line of the West Finals (and Ottawa to the bottom line of the East Finals, now), because that is how brackets almost universally operate. It is not at all difficult to see who has home ice advantage because the higher-seeded team always has home-ice advantage, and at any rate, someone who cares to know that sort of information is going to know different leagues operate in different ways; if a reader didn't know before looking at the bracket how the league assigns home advantage, the chart would be a foolish place to try and find that information for the first time. This, of course, poses a challenge (as yet un-met) about how to signify who enjoys home advantage in the Finals, where seeding is no longer relevant or comparable. The NBA pages are taking to italicizing the "home" team; I would prefer underlining to italicizing, and for our purposes I would suggest putting the number of points in parentheses after the team's name, but I think we can come up with a solution that doesn't require post hoc rejiggering the bracket's shape to match up with the actual results (which is ultimately the thing we decided not to do QF-->SF). 76.10.24.245 03:31, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Really? I thought of all places the NHL website should have a bracket. Well then, either we continue reseeding up to the Conf. finals and eliminate the lines, or do not reseed and use the conventional bracket mechanism upper half goes to upper part, lower half to lower part, etc. BTW, for the Stanley Cup Finals I was the one who suggested italicizing in the NBA playoffs since it'll be easier to to and you'll not have to add more numbers. Underlining can be hard since different users different preferences, they can underline links - or perhaps we can delink the teams from the conf. semifinals so that we can add underlines? Or asterisks? --Howard the Duck 04:57, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I have a feeling you're setting up a false dichotomy, but if I had to choose between those options, I'd pick the latter. The reason we put the lines in after the QF-->SF transition is that the matchups are "fixed" or pre-determined. The NHL PLayoffs behave like a traditional bracket after the QF-->SF transition. As a result, I'd recommend doing what a traditional bracket does after the QF-->SF transition, which is putting teams on whatever line they most naturally should appear on, irrespective of whether they have home advantage. As for the NBA: this is not the place to hash that out, but I just wanted to say to Howard that I am mostly indifferent, I just think underlining is easier to read than italics (which, depending on where we go with this bracket in the Cup Finals, might be a useful observation in this debate down the road). 76.10.24.245 05:06, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm saying is that if ever we'll be underlining, we should delink the teams from the conf. semis onwards, since some users may set their links to be underlined at the "my preferences" so it'll be useless. I agree with everything else you said, though. --Howard the Duck 07:24, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

text: I don't care either as long as it won't add more numbers in the bracket. But if you people would do underlining, I'd say we should delink teams from the Conf. Semis. onwards. --Howard the Duck 16:18, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It would seem it's been changed back, without the changer contributing to this discussion as it has developed. 76.10.24.245 16:48, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: You know what, since the seeds exclusively determine who gets the home ice advantage, it seems that we won't need to italicize/underline/whatever's agreed upon unless it's the Finals already. --Howard the Duck 17:00, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Absolutely. I thought I indicated that before; the discussion is only helpful to the extent that it produces a consensus on how to indicate home ice advantage in the Cup Finals. I don't see what the fixation is with having the home team on the top line of the matchup is. It's fine to do that when you can, but I see no reason to insist upon it for later rounds when the pairings are pre-determined. And I don't know why someone removed Anaheim from the West Finals without adding to this discussion. 76.10.24.245 18:57, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I added a comment right above the Western Conference Finals part of the bracket to point people to this discussion; hopefully it won't be reverted again. I'd also like to point out that if we add a method of showing home ice to the Finals, we would probably want to do it to all the rounds for consistency. For an indicator, maybe a dagger next to the team, and a footnote right under the bracket to indicate that means home ice? Comrade Tux 22:18, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Honestly, I think that's unnecessary. I think if you put in text above the bracket that all higher-seeded teams have home ice, and maybe even just write down the team that enjoyed home ice in the Cup Finals, that should be sufficient, or possibly italicize them in the Finals. To me, the question of who has home ice in a series is just not something you really should be turning to a playoff bracket to look up. A bracket is a graphical representation of a tournament path. If we decide to use some indicator for who has home ice in the Finals, it would almost be confusing to use that same indicator in the rest of the bracket as it would imply there is some home advantage determinant other than seed (such as in the NBA playoffs). Putting a dagger or italics or whatever for the preceding rounds is simply redundant; the seed says it all. 76.10.24.245 01:11, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I actually added a note at  but it was removed, although the reversion was legit. Again, it doesn't matter for me if its italics, underline, asterisk, ALL CAPS (as much as possible it doesn't add anything else) but not a dagger (would be too big IMHO), adding more numbers or the top half convention. --Howard the Duck 01:41, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
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