NHL Realignment Project – Week 41: Bring Back the Whale

Week 41's entry was only five days late, which is slightly different from the previous week's six. In that spirit, the scenario was only slightly different from the previous week's as well.

The Whale

The economic viability of Hartford is a question, but everyone loves the idea of the Whalers coming back into the league, and their uniforms are part of the reason. For some reason we all have a soft spot for them. The author put it more simply: c'mon, it's the whale.

Columbus makes room

To accommodate Hartford and keep the previous week's structure, the league had to lose a team that few have any kind of soft spot for, and the entry named Columbus as the casualty. It is a blunt piece of arithmetic, and the post did not dress it up.

Two relocations, two expansions, 32 teams

The resulting league is 32 teams in four conferences of eight, clustered as reasonably as geography allows, with Seattle, Quebec City, Kansas City and Hartford as the four additions. Readers who were paying close attention were told, with a wink, that a whole lot of copy and paste from the previous week had gone into the post.

Why the map works

• The Whale, because nostalgia is a legitimate argument when a market has already proven it will show up.
• Geography and travel, since no division spans more than two time zones and no Eastern Time Zone team sits in the Western half.
• An all-inclusive schedule in which every team visits every other team's building.
• Rivalries, with all the major ones preserved apart from Chicago and Detroit, and the four Flyers, Rangers, Devils and Penguins clubs kept together.

The schedule and the playoffs

The math was unchanged from week 40: two home and two away against seven conference rivals for 28 games, one home and one away against the 24 teams in the other conferences for 48, and an additional home-and-home against three rotating opponents for six, which comes to 82 games.

The top four in each conference qualify. The first two rounds decide conference champions, the third round is a semifinal in which the team with the best regular season record chooses its opponent, and the fourth round is the Stanley Cup Final.

The trade-off

Hartford in, Columbus out is the kind of swap that makes a map look romantic and a business case look difficult. The post knew that, which is why the arena question and the soft spot for the whale sit in the same paragraph.