“We’ll… I uh think we did… uh… some nice things in the 3rd period.”

“No, what do you think about realignment?”

“I think um we did win some individual puck battles eh.”

“I said realignment.”

“Can’t let them have free run in the crease… uh… you know?”

(Shouting) “R-e-a-l-i-g-n-m-e-n-t”

“Face off win.”

“Monkey pooh?”

“Shouldn’t realign the league man, fans will get confused.”

How do you think the Devils ended up in New Jersey?
How do you think the Stats ended up in Dallas?
How do you think the Avalanche ended up in Colorado?
How do you think the Jets ended up in Winnipeg?
How do you think the Coyotes ended up Phoenix?
How do you think the Flames ended up in Calgary?
How do you think the Hurricanes ended up in Carolina?

You can go back even further
How did the California Golden Bears become the Cleveland Barons who eventually merged with the Minnesota North Stars who then moved to Dallas.

How did the Kansas City Scouts become the Colorado Rockies who are now the New Jersey Devils.

My point is, as long as you have enough teams and possibly expansion, your always going to have teams relocate. Phoenix could be next, Columbus is an option, Edmonton is an option, as arenas get older and teams hold their current cities hostage, if they don’t fork millions over, another city will.

It certainly is possible to be critical of the realignment that was proposed last year, but realignment is going to take something more radical than swapping around a team or two.

I love the idea of conference playoffs. Anyone who remembers the 80′s recall them as iconic rivalries. Maybe they could qualify the top three in each conference, then have teams four and five play in a one game wild card to get in.

That said, this scenario seems to be a band-aid until expansion/relocation happens.

Putting up with 4 starts in CA/BC (3 hours behind), and 4 more that are 2 hours behind is a small inconvenience compared to having your entire division outside of your time zone (Winnipeg, Vancouver, Minnesota, Dallas). That would be 18/19 road games a year guaranteed to be in a different time zone, plus playoffs. A West Coast fan watching road games against 2 conferences that are in the Eastern Time Zone still comes out ahead.

Taking the Top 4 teams in each division is not fair at all. If they did that with the way the divisions are now, they’d probably say Top 3 in each division (Yes I know that gives you 18, but 16 doesn’t divide evenly). Well you can count out Chicago, who had a 100+ point season but doesn’t get a playoff spot. But that’s nothing compared to New Jersey, a team that had a 100+ point season AND made the SC Finals, but now don’t get a playoff spot. Their spots now go to teams like Colorado and Tampa who finished the season with almost 20 less points than them. It’s not fair to designate a ranking of a certain number of teams unless you realigned the divisions every year and make sure every division is equally fair. Half the spots can go to the designated teams that win or get second in their division, but the other half go to the teams that worked their asses off and earned the spot.

in 10 and 11, Detroit played Phoenix and then San Jose and rounds 1 and 2. It was really kinda boring to see the same teams in the playoffs.

First, it will almost always be harder to make it through the expanded Atlantic than (likely) any other conference, because there’s a greater cluster of teams that will always have money. It’ll never be fair across conferences, and teams like Carolina will regularly fall short of the playoffs when they can’t get in without besting like 4 cap teams. You could make a similar argument for the expanded Central.

Second, I get that people think the conference playoffs will be better because of the rivalries, and that’s probably the case for a couple of years. But I don’t want to see the same teams in the playoffs for two rounds year after year after year, especially when so much of the schedule will be conference play. That sucks – traditional or no. Nevermind that you won’t get new rivalries developing – since it’s the playoffs that creates them.

I can’t for the life of me understand why they don’t just bump Columbus into the new Atlantic, and then keep the 1-8 playoff format. They’ll want to keep Det with Chi – but no one cares about Columbus as a rival. And if (when?) Phoenix moves, it can stay in the Pacific (Seattle?) or just be added to the NE (Hamilton or QC?), and Columbus can stay where it is. So much more fair, while still keeping the advantages of travel/time zone. It solves, as far as I can tell, everybody’s problems.

It’s not the NHL/NHLPA’s issue to fix the fact that you turn into a pumpkin sometime before 11 local time.

To me the bonkers aspect of the last proposed realignment is having two divisions in which more teams with worse travel schedules compete for the same number of playoff spots as teams in two other divisions which never have a divisional game outside of their time zone and rarely have ones they can’t return home after.