NHL Realignment Project – Week 45: The Short Version

This was probably going to be the shortest write up of all time, because the longest write up of all time had already been written and then lost. An accidental and tiny single finger swipe on a Magic Mouse, under OS X Lion, acts as a back button. Good times.

Two conferences, by majority opinion

More fans seemed to prefer the two-conference alignment than the four-conference one, so the majority got its way this week. Since the author now followed Gary Bettman on Twitter, and the commissioner has three tweets, the conference names stayed geographic to keep him happy too.

Southwest Division and an Atlantic problem

The Pacific was renamed the Southwest Division, since Colorado and Phoenix are not even in the same time zone as the Pacific Coast. No replacement name could be found for the Atlantic, but the argument was that Detroit fans would be so overjoyed to be out of the Western Conference that they would not mind. Readers with a better idea for an eastern division that strays pretty far from the coast were invited to leave it in the comments.

Who leaves, who arrives

Columbus and Carolina were the two teams sacrificed, with a small apology attached: Phoenix won their division, so they had to be thrown a bone this week. Seattle and Quebec City took the vacated places, which made the residents of both cities very loyal and happy subjects.

The 82-game schedule

Why it holds up

• Travel: only Winnipeg has a legitimate beef, and the folks in Manitoba will be thrilled to trade some late starts out West for much more meaningful rivals from Alberta and BC. No team other than the Jets has to travel more than one time zone over for in-division games.
• The East gets its Wings, which is its own reward for the people of Detroit.
• Fairness: the divisions are made up of exactly the same number of teams, so everyone has the same chance to make the playoffs. Math does not care that one five-team division might have four amazing teams while another has only two.
• Rivalries: some are lost, notably Philadelphia and the Rangers and Detroit and Chicago, but the vast majority survive, and the schedule guarantees every team plays every other team home and away at least once.

Playoff escape hatches

The top two teams in each division qualify automatically, as division champion and runner up, and the two best records in the conference outside those top-two spots also qualify. Divisional positioning only guarantees a spot in the tournament, not seeding: the eight qualifiers are seeded one through eight by record, then play 1 versus 8, 2 versus 7, 3 versus 6 and 4 versus 5, with survivors reseeded. Every series is best-of-seven in the 2-2-1-1-1 format.

The next installment, or maybe the one after, was promised to football fans of the round ball, actual foot use variety. Two words for them: AHL and relegation.