For an outfit with a history of sketchy decisions—a glowing puck, two work stoppages in the past 15 years, and expansion into half a dozen places that didn’t want or need the sport—the National Hockey League got this one right.

Whether by design or just a stroke of very good fortune, the NHL absolutely nailed it when finishing up its regular-season schedule with nothing but divisional games. Although the hockey each and every night hasn’t always lived up to the hype, the fact that there has been hype for virtually every game for the past two weeks is exactly what the league was hoping to achieve.

The critics will argue that the reason so many games have such importance is that mediocrity allowed a dozen of the 15 teams in each conference to truly believe they had a shot at a playoff spot. And they may have a point. But, again, the very fact that the critics have reason to discuss the NHL at all at this time of the season is a good thing for hockey, with major-league baseball getting started and college basketball’s March Madness grabbing headlines both here and south of the border.

The beauty of the schedule the way it was set out this year was that teams were going to get exactly what they deserved from the stretch run. In order to make the playoffs and have a shot at the Stanley Cup, teams have been forced to play—and win—meaningful games against their chief rivals and the teams they’re battling with for those same postseason berths.

“It’s great,” Canucks defenceman Kevin Bieksa told the Georgia Straight during a recent interview at G.M. Place. “As athletes, all you want is to control your own destiny, and by playing all these divisional games, we’ve known since the start of the season that if we stayed close to the pack, we’d have a chance at the end of the year. And that’s what we have.”

For most of the year, the Canucks went about their business knowing full well that their final nine games were against the other Northwest Division teams and that regardless of how well or poorly they played, very little would really be settled until the final two weeks of the season.

That’s why even after a March 20 win in Edmonton that moved Vancouver within a single point of first-place Minnesota and six points clear of ninth place in the conference, the Canucks knew nothing was set in stone as far as clinching a playoff spot was concerned and that they still had plenty of work to do.

A week later, the schedule was about the only thing the Canucks had working in their favour as they hit the skids on a four-game losing streak. The fact was, the Canucks always knew that if they kept the teams they were chasing within striking distance they were going to finish the year with four straight games on home ice.

“When we first looked at the schedule last summer, we said it would be going down to the wire, and that’s exactly what’s happening,” Canucks head coach Alain Vigneault said. “And we’ve been very good at home this year, so we just have to continue to take care of our home games and we’ll be there [in the playoffs].”

There was a night not too long ago that had the idle Canucks scoreboard-watching while Calgary played in Colorado and Edmonton hosted Minnesota. The way the standings were prior to those games, Flames fans had no choice but to pull for the Oilers and Oiler fans found themselves having to cheer for the Flames to give their teams the best results possible. Everyone knows that it takes extraordinary circumstances to get people in the Alberta cities to agree on anything when it comes to hockey—and extraordinary circumstances are exactly what this schedule has produced almost nightly somewhere in the National Hockey League.

As much fun as the Northwest Division has been to follow over the past few weeks, it is by no means the only division in hockey that has seen a remarkable race. Other than the Detroit Red Wings sewing up the Central Division title before Christmas, every other division in hockey has benefited from the schedule and the battles it has produced. People out West have been so focused on what’s happening with the Canucks and the teams around them that they’ve likely lost sight of the equally outstanding races in the Eastern Conference.

With all of these divisional games grouped together at the end of the season, it has been a fascinating yet fruitless effort trying to project results. Just when the playoff picture looks like it might be coming into focus, one team will heat up or another will cool off (or both) and things are as blurry as ever.

When the Canucks kicked off their final home stand of the year with a 6-2 win over Calgary on March 30, Vancouver jumped from ninth to eighth in the standings, and that same result knocked the Flames from sixth to seventh. At the completion of play that night—just one week from the end of the regular season—enough scenarios still existed that the Canucks could have finished as high as fifth or as low as 11th in the West.

All of this cannot be lost on the people who run the league, and every effort has to be made to ensure that these late-season divisional battles become a fixture on the schedule. Ideally, rivals would go at it early in the season to inject some energy into the division races, but the bulk of these vital games should be saved for season’s end.

The season may be winding down, but the drama for many teams is far from over. And that’s a good thing for the NHL.