The South(l)east Division: Five Teams, Too Much Travel

Most people have always had kind of a snide view of the Southeast Division. Despite the fact that Southeast teams have won two Stanley Cup championships since 2004, a feat only duplicated by the Central Division with Detroit in 2008 and Chicago in 2010, and that they have the most famous and recognizable player in the sport, they have somehow been stuck with the reputation of being the oh yeah, those guys division.

The reputation versus the record

For most years the numbers did not really add up to validate the negative view. Two championships in eight seasons is not the profile of a weak division, and the star power was there. The reputation, in other words, was doing more work than the evidence.

This season the numbers are bleak

2011-12 was different. With the Thrashers' move to Winnipeg, the teams in the division each had to endure so much more travel than they were used to, and the post's verdict was blunt: they just don't seem to be handling it well.

Winnipeg carries the heaviest load

The Jets had to endure the most travel amongst the five Southeast teams. It helped that they have really amazing fans and were finally playing in a city that actually cares about them, but they were still mired with the same type of record as their four counterparts, all between 67 and 77 points as of the writing.

Why the West copes better

Dallas, Minnesota and Colorado, and to a lesser extent their Pacific and Northwest brethren, carry similar travel burdens. The difference is time. They have had years to acclimate to the strain, or at least as much as is possible, while the Southeast was handed a new geography in a single summer.

The point of the whole project

Hopefully next season will be the last in which divisions have this much east-to-west spread in them. That issue has basically been the point of the NHL Realignment Project, and the division table was the cleanest way to show what happens when a third division joins the Pacific and Northwest in paying for the map.

A map, in the end, is an argument. Five teams bunched in the standings and spread across a continent made the argument better than any schedule breakdown could.