With the Board of Governors meeting come and gone, and their decision to ratify the realignment plan for the 2012-2013 season, I wonder if this plan will create more problems than solutions.
Although I agree that a realignment was definitely necessary, I just don’t think essentially separating the league into 4 conferences by position on a map is the best way to go about it. Obviously geography plays a big role when it comes to conferences, and it’s the reason realignment is necessary to begin with. However, just because Nashville and Winnipeg fall between the allotted longitudinal lines doesn’t mean they should be in the same conference and be forced to make that flight three or four times a year.
One of the Eastern conferences is just confusing. Although Florida and Tampa Bay may not be in the top 10 for average attendance, how does it make sense to group them with five teams from the northeast? Boston, Buffalo, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto all make sense to put in a conference, but the addition of the Florida teams is just rediculous. In the other eastern conference, it’s the exact opposite. All the teams in the conference have connected states with the exception of the Hurricanes.
Beyond the conferences themselves, this addition of divisional playoffs just doesn’t make sense to me. I understand the idea of creating rivalries and really drawing fans to that hatred when it’s all on the line. But every conference is going to suffer from this, because the new conference system basically pits the same two teams against each other every year.
In the “west/northwest” division, San Jose and Vancouver, with the possibility of the Kings, will more than likely play each other every year for the next 4-5 years. Great for that “rivalry” but what about the other 6 teams in the league? In the “midwest” conference, same story, Detroit and Chicago are obvious choices, although Minnesota has really shown the entire league something this year with their recent hot streak. In the East division with Boston, they are the obvious pick to win that division for the next five years. In the final Eastern conference, Pittsburgh and Washington will likely battle throughout the regular season and again in the new playoff system.
Again, I understand the idea of “divisional playoffs”, that by doing so you create and fuel rivalries by teams geographically close together. However, I think by doing this you take away from that playoff atmosphere you can get from teams across the country. Anaheim and Detroit played almost every year in the first round in the early 2000s. It seem like every year they played 10 games worth of periods every series in which they met. Not saying I like the idea of the Wings going to the west coast every three days during a series, but those games will always stand out in my mind, and they stand out because Anaheim was a team you didn’t see very often during the regular season.
I’m not saying my proposal for realignment was perfect. It was far from it. I similarly screwed the teams from Florida as far as travel went, but with my idea there was only so much you could do with them. I think geographic clusters of teams seems like a better idea than seemingly drawing arbitrary vertical lines on a map and saying “you fit here, you fit there”.
My biggest complaint comes with the new playoff system. In my proposal I would’ve liked to have seen the top two teams from each conference automatically be the top eight seeds broken up into two brackets. The remaining eight teams would be made up from the next best eight records. No restrictions to conferences. Simply put, the best 16 teams get in, unlike the current system which involves four teams from the eastern conference which wouldn’t even be in the top 10 in the west.
Feel free to let me know what you think about the NHL’s realignment, mine, or what you would do different.
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