NHL Realignment Project – Week 38: Four Conferences Return

Insomnia served the project well this week. In addition to finally finishing a very late entry, it brought word that sometime on Thursday a plan for an NBA and NHL arena to be built in Seattle would be revealed.

The news that changed the plan

The idea had been to go with contraction, but the arena news pushed that back another week and produced yet another scenario with Seattle involved. Readers were pointed to the Seattle Times for the story rather than given a summary of it.

Something new, something old

Adding Salt Lake City covered the something new, even though the city has won a Stanley Cup in the past. To balance the newness with some oldness, three former NHL cities were given a team again.

In: Seattle, Salt Lake City, Quebec City, Hamilton and Hartford. Out: Phoenix, the New York Islanders and the Columbus Blue Jackets. That is one more city in than out, which is how the league arrives at 32 teams.

Four conferences with old school names

Behold the return of the four-conference NHL, named after the old division names: Patrick, Adams, Norris and Smythe. Eight teams in each conference for a total of 32.

For scheduling reasons only, each conference is subdivided into two four-team scheduling pods, marked on the map by a thin double line. The post was emphatic that these are not divisions: a team's primary goal in a season is to finish in the top four of its conference to qualify for the playoffs, and pods have nothing to do with the standings. It is a rehashing of a plan from many weeks earlier, built for a smarter, more balanced and more travel-friendly schedule.

The schedule

What the map buys

• Geography: the conferences are pretty sound, and the one beef someone might have is the Detroit to Colorado jaunt, which is a single two-time-zone jump those two teams will not mind given their history.
• Travel: games outside your conference are one home and one away per team, minimizing the longest trips, and the pods shorten the longer trips within conference.
• Rivalries: Chicago and Detroit, the Rangers and Devils, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Montreal and Boston all stay, with revived rivalries in Boston and Hartford and Quebec City and Montreal, plus new ones in Seattle and Vancouver and Toronto and Hamilton.
• Heritage: the division names are awesome, and hockey is special enough that the conference names should reflect that anew.

The playoff shape

The top four teams from each conference qualify. The first and second rounds decide the conference champions and give us a Final Four, and then the Final Four team with the best record chooses its opponent for the semi-final round. The post was curious about what would go into that choice: travel distance, the least-hot goalie, how tired an opponent might be after a previous series. The two semi-final winners square off in the Stanley Cup Finals.