The much talked-about NHL realignment plan was released today. The NHL has been trying to realign ever since the Jets moved to Winnipeg and they had a team in Central Canada stuck in the Southeast Division. They made a proposal last December that they wanted to take effect this season, but it was stupid and the players thankfully rejected it. Today came Round 2.
The biggest changes with the new plan is that somebody explained to the NHL that you can't have four conferences, so those "conferences" are now called "divisions" (what they actually are). They also juggled some of the teams around, moving both Columbus and Detroit to the Eastern Conference and switching Colorado from the Pacific Divison to the Midwest Division.
The schedule and playoff format are also slightly better in this proposed alignment. The December 2011 version of the schedule called for two games against everybody, but also a ridiculous number of intradivision games. Then intradivision playoffs. In other words, you would've been playing the same teams over and over again. Now they're proposing two interconference, three with the other division in your own conference and four or five in your division. It's much more balanced, which is significantly better.
And instead of going back to the pre-1994 division playoffs, the new playoff format has the top three teams in each division qualifying automatically, with the last two spots going to wild cards from either division. Theoretically, it could be five teams from one division and three from the other making the playoffs. That's OK. Because under the old proposal, you could've had a team with the fifth-best record in hockey not making the playoffs simply because it finished fifth in its division. (And not to mention the fact that teams like the Islanders would've had little to no chance of ever getting in, since some combination of the Penguins, Devils, Flyers, Rangers and Capitals are all good every year.)
They had to get Winnipeg out of the East. Everyone knows that. But there are still problems with the new divisions that I think need to be addressed before I can get completely on board with NHL realignment. The first is that the NHL brass is clearly not full of math majors. First, they wanted to have four conferences instead of two, which made no sense. Now, they want to have one conference with 16 teams and another with 14. Sure, Baseball made it work for 15 years, but even they've gone to the 15-15 split. That's what it should be. Especially since it's inherently unfair to have 14 teams with a 57 percent chance of making the playoffs and 16 with only a 50 percent chance.
I understand there are 16 teams in the Eastern Time Zone. That doesn't mean you have to put them all in the Eastern Conference. One has to be in the West for the conferences to be balanced. And, sorry Detroit and Columbus, but you're the furthest west. Being with all of the teams in the Central Time Zone wouldn't be killer on travel. Especially since those are their biggest rivals.
Also, by making the Red Wings happy and moving them to the East, you're screwing over the entire Western Conference. Especially the Chicago Blackhawks. Now you've got five Original Six teams in the East with only Chicago in the West. More significantly, the Red Wings are the Blackhawks' biggest rivals. You're willing to throw away 90 years of history just to make the Red Wings happy? (Not to mention their rivalries with teams like St. Louis that date back to the days of the Norris Division.) And for all the other teams in the Western Conference, they're losing the biggest draw that they bring into their arenas. I'm sure that most of the Eastern Conference teams aren't happy about having one of the best teams in the league switch conferences, either.
Detroit's biggest concern was that they constantly had to go back-and-forth to the West Coast. The new schedule will help that anyway, though. And going from the extreme Western portion of the Eastern Time Zone to the Central Time Zone isn't exactly back-breaking. 8:00 games aren't 10:00 games. Besides, if you're going to play a home-and-home against everybody, you've still got to go to California four times, Western Canada three times, Phoenix and Colorado. That's nine games.
I also have a slight problem with the Easternmost teams in the league (Boston and Montreal) being in the "Central" division, along with a bunch of other teams (Florida, Tampa Bay, Buffalo, Torono and Ottawa) that aren't exactly in the Central. In fact, of those eight teams, the only one that's actually "Central" is Detroit, although you could make some slight argument for Buffalo and Toronto. I'd like to propose a different name for the Central Division. Although, I'm not sure what, since "Northeast" wouldn't work because of the two Florida teams.
I'll give the NHL some credit. This is definitely better. But there's still some work to do. It'll require some minor tweaking, but I think this is probably pretty close to what we're going to see next season. Regardless, there's going to be some sort of NHL realignment. And it's coming sooner rather than later. While I'd prefer something a little smaller than these widespread changes, it doesn't look like that's going to happen. And, on the surface, it seems like they did a good job of catering to what everyone wanted. Except for maybe the fans. But this is the NHL we're talking about. What do the fans matter?
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