Voisin’s article is centered around the Maloof’s who currently own the Sacramento Kings of the NBA.  They apparently want out of their marriage to the Kings and according to Voisin, a deal is in the works to sell the team to Seattle investors Chris Hansen and Steve Ballmer.  The pair would then look at relocating the club to Seattle and thus freeing the Maloof’s of their ties to the NBA.  All so that they can venture into the idea of owing a franchise is another major sports league, either the MLB or the NHL.

While Voisin focuses on the Kings and how the Maloof’s are trying to leave town as quickly as possible, she does mention that the NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has met with the interested owners.  Furthermore, the Maloof’s have “for months looked into buying a hockey franchise, with Las Vegas among the possible destinations” writes Voisin.

So could this actually be a potential point of expansion for Bettman and the NHL?  I’m sure he’d love to get into business with the Maloof’s who would come with deep pockets.  What about having them buying the Phoenix Coyotes and moving the team to Las Vegas?  Bettman has said he wants to keep the team in Phoenix, but if no owners can be found and this family of investors is knocking on the door, would Gary be foolish to not at least listen to what they have to say?  It appears he already has listened but no one knows how far the league’s commissioner would actually go to explore the possibilities of putting a team in Vegas.

With no other professional sports team currently in the highly populated city of tourists, it would be a hard sell to many hockey fans to put a team in Vegas.  Known more for it’s night life, high profile gambling and the ideal bachelor and bachelorette parties, the frozen game of hockey would be a side show that would rank somewhere after Carrot Top, Criss Angel and The Men Down Under.

Mr. Bettman had best use his better sense of judgement on this one and take off his rose colored glasses before looking at expanding to Nevada.  Dollars and cents aside, Las Vegas is not a hockey market.  In fact, you could argue that it’s not a football market, it’s not a baseball market and it’s not a basketball market.  It’s a niche market that has one sole purpose; entertainment.

Are major sporting events not entertainment?  Yes they are, but not the kind that drums up the interest when people venture to Las Vegas.  Would a group of young men who are heading to Vegas for a weekend to celebrate their pals’ last weekend of freedom rather take in a hockey game or play cards, drink and find mischief on “the strip.”  If given that choice I know which one I’m taking if I was back in my early twenties, and it doesn’t involve ice (well maybe a little but it wouldn’t be used to skate on).  You get the picture.

A second team in Toronto or better yet a team back in Quebec City has the most logic when looking at the impact on the game of hockey.  You don’t have to look any further than the Winnipeg Jets and how they’ve strived since receiving their beloved team back.  Corporate dollars aside, Winnipeg has proven to Bettman that the city and it’s fans will support the club for a guaranteed five years. After that, if management can’t put a winning product on the ice, then you can call it a failed experiment for the second time around.  Until then, they have the season ticket sales to prove that moving the Trashers from Atlanta to north of the border was the right call.

So when looking at Las Vegas as a potential home to a NHL team or one of the aforementioned Canadian cities it becomes clear what the answer is.  Expanding the NHL to include Las Vegas would be like betting on double zeros all night long.  The payoff “could” be great, but the odds are stacked firmly against you Gary.

It’s your bet Mr. Bettman.  Choose wisely.

Without further adieu, here is the latest two-conference, four-division proposal:

Eastern Conference

• Atlantic: Carolina, Columbus, New Jersey, NY Islanders, NY Rangers, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington
• Central: Boston, Buffalo, Detroit, Florida, Montreal, Ottawa, Tampa Bay, Toronto

Western Conference

• Midwest: Chicago, Colorado, Dallas, Minnesota, Nashville, St. Louis, Winnipeg
• Pacific: Anaheim, Calgary, Edmonton, Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Jose, Vancouver

The regular season scheduling will still be weighted heavier within a team’s own conference and heaviest within its own division.  However, each team will play every other team in the league both home and away each season.

The playoff format will revert from an 8-seed conference tournament to two initial rounds of divisional play.  This means that the first round of the divisional playoffs will be 1 vs. 4 and 2 vs. 3 within the division; both winners meet in the second round; division winners meet in the conference finals; conference champions meet for the Stanley Cup.

The one wrinkle to the divisional playoff seeding is a reported “wild card.”  The top three teams in each division at the conclusion of the regular season will automatically qualify for the playoffs.  The final seed in each division will be made up of the next-best two teams in the conference, regardless of which division.

This means that within the same conference, five teams could qualify from one division and just three from another.  The division winner with the highest point total would then take on the wild card team with the lowest point total.  How does this proposal shake out?

The Good

Detroit Red Wings and Toronto Maple Leafs will be able to reignite their historic Original 6 rivalry; Mandatory Credit: Abelimages/Getty Images

Perhaps the most important part of any realignment is maintaining rivalries.  This proposal does an excellent job at maintaining the historic and ongoing rivalries in the current-day Northeast and Atlantic Divisions.  By flipping Detroit into the Eastern Conference, the Red Wings can ostensibly resume their suspended rivalry with the Toronto Maple Leafs.  By placing teams like the Pittsburgh Penguins and Washington Capitals into the same division, these two teams can really take their present-day rivalry to new heights.

Realignment became necessary when the Atlanta Thrashers relocated to become the second incarnation of the Winnipeg Jets.  The Jets needed to find a home in a Western Conference division, and the move was likely to shake up a conference with many geographic concerns to begin with.  The proposed Midwest and Pacific Divisions probably do the best job and creating a geographic alignment that is most true to travelling within the same time zone.  The one exception to this is in Colorado, where the Avalanche find themselves on Mountain Time, rather than Central.  For Winnipeg, they’re now able to develop the rivalry that everyone has hoped to incite with the Minnesota Wild, their closest neighbors.

In terms of scheduling, I view it as a positive that teams will still play a schedule tilted towards more meetings with both divisional and conference opponents, slightly upgraded in that sense from the outline of last year’s proposal.  For organizations that have a tough time drawing fans, seeing every team in their barn every year can only help put people in the seats to get a look at the top team/player attractions the league has to offer.

What I like most about this proposal is the playoff format, one which happens to be the Jack Edwards design that I endorsed in my previous column.  The old school aspect of “play-your-way-out” of your division coupled with a wild card formula that would help to resolve competitive imbalance is spot on.

Familiarity breeds contempt.  If there is such a thing as too much familiarity, to the extent where repeated early round playoff opponents begin to grow stale, the wild card will serve as a combatant.  As I wrote before, “Fans will still get to see plenty of hated rivals match up with each other in the first two rounds of divisional playoffs, while still having the possibility of a more unique matchup or two when their team slides over to compete in the conference’s other division. Even when a team’s divisional rival finishes as a 5^th seed and is flipped to the other division, there is still the chance the two could meet up in the conference finals, where a rivalry is even further enhanced.”

The Bad

As admirable a job as the NHL did at preserving many of their existing rivalries, there were a few casualties.  Most notably, the Original 6 feud between Detroit and the Chicago Blackhawks will be severely leveled.  More recently, the current Central Division has also seen antagonism between Detroit and the St. Louis Blues, not to mention one of the preeminent budding rivalries in the league right now between Detroit and the Nashville Predators.

Speaking of Nashville, they may not be happy about remaining in the Western Conference.  Under this proposed realignment, the Predators find themselves as the eastern most team in the West.  Had the NHL elected to go with the least radical form of realignment based on their current structure, the most logical one-for-one switch would’ve been placing Winnipeg in the Central Division and swapping Nashville into the Southeast.  The state of Tennessee is split between the Eastern and Central Time Zones (though Nashville is in the Central), and the area’s proximity to teams in the current Southeast Division meant that the exchange could have been a feast for the Preds.

Looking at the league’s two southernmost teams, what do the Tampa Bay Lightning and Florida Panthers think about being grouped with Detroit and the present-day Northeast Division?  Aside from pairing the state of Florida squads together, the two were hard to group elsewhere.  Still, it makes more sense for the alignment of the rest of the league to slot the Florida teams in the new Central Division, while those arenas benefit from enhanced attendance as fans from Northeast cities often vacation and retire in the Sunshine State.  Still, players on these two squads might as well take up second residencies up north.

The new scheduling also means that there are fewer interdivisional rivalry matchups between teams like Chicago—Vancouver and (the NBC-led) Boston—New York Rangers.  Rivals like Detroit and Colorado will only play each other twice a year, and wouldn’t meet in another classic playoff series until the Stanley Cup Finals (which might actually be the only way to elevate their playoff rivalry from the past two decades).

The Ugly

Of course, the ugliest part of this proposal is still the unbalanced divisions/conferences.  Thirty does not divide by four, but it does divide by two.  Having both of the overloaded eight-team divisions appear in the Eastern Conference could be enough for the NHLPA to nix this proposition.

Furthermore, instability still remains amongst several of the league’s franchises.  Additional realignment might not be necessary if, say, Phoenix relocates to Seattle, but suddenly it appears less of a foregone conclusion that the NHL is interested in a return to Quebec City or fielding another squad in (Greater) Toronto.  If this competitive imbalance is just a prelude to expansion, a new team in Seattle could easily be placed in the Pacific Division and Kansas City or Wisconsin in the Midwest.  Still, that’s bad news for cities falling east of the divide.

For fans of Western cities who are annoyed with the media’s East Coast bias, prepare to be further alienated.  The Winged Wheel of Detroit, perhaps the current Western Conference’s biggest television and attendance draw, are taking their fanfare to the East.

On the other side of the coin, the Atlantic Division contains a cluster of several major media market teams.  Sure, today’s Atlantic Division is pretty similar, but the current playoff format allows for more of these teams to qualify for (and go deeper in) the postseason.  In the proposed Central Division, television networks find four of the Original 6 squads in a similar cluster.

The ugliest thing about the Eastern Conference division opposite the Atlantic is its name, the Central Division.  Though the names in this proposal are not final, it would feel odd that Boston, the NHL’s easternmost city, would be competing in the Central.  Adding the two Florida teams to Detroit and the Northeast Division may prove to be prohibitive for retaining the Northeast name, but I do feel they can do better.  Maybe a return to the Adams, Norris, Patrick, and Smythe Division names is in the cards?  An idea has even surfaced that the NHL could look to earn revenue through sponsored divisions.  Would it serve the league well to line their pockets while teams battle their way out of the Bridgestone Division?

There may not be any way to realign the NHL that will satisfy all thirty teams.  The proposal you see above represents the best thing for appeasing the most teams.  It won’t last forever and it stands to reason that it could even be tweaked before it is implemented.  For my money, the alignment looks good and the playoff structure looks great.  Ratify this proposal and let’s draw up a schedule for the 2013-14 season.

The Jets returned to Winnipeg in 2011-12; Mandatory Credit: Lance Thomson, NHLI via Getty Images

With the Atlanta Thrashers relocating to Winnipeg following the 2011 season, relocation became a necessity.  There wouldn’t be enough time for the logistics of realignment and drawing up a new schedule for the 2011-12 season, so it was decided that the franchise would remain in the Eastern Conference for one more season, continuing to compete in the Southeast Division.

Going forward, different theories began to trickle out on the best ways to realign.  Some expected a one-for-one switch between Winnipeg and a Western Conference team, perhaps in the Central Division.  Others envisioned a domino effect, whereby a few teams would be displaced and bump each other over.  While some teams were concerned with geographic and travel concerns, others fought to preserve rivalries.  Dallas wanted into the Central; Detroit wanted to go east; Winnipeg wanted to be grouped with Minnesota.  As Gary Bettman put it, “If you asked 30 clubs you probably would get 30 different solutions.”

What Bettman and the NHL’s Board of Governors came up with was a brand new system, dubbed by many as “Radical Realignment.”  The premise of the plan was a four conference system, two conferences made up of seven teams and two made up of eight.  The conferences shook out as follows:

• Conference A: Anaheim, Calgary, Colorado, Edmonton, Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Jose, Vancouver
• Conference B: Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Detroit, Minnesota, Nashville, St. Louis, Winnipeg
• Conference C: Boston, Buffalo, Florida, Montreal, Ottawa, Tampa Bay, Toronto
• Conference D: Carolina, New Jersey, NY Islanders, NY Rangers, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington

Overall, these groupings did a very good job at keeping rivalries intact.  Detroit may have wanted to join a grouping with Toronto so as to reignite their historic rivalry, but doing so likely would have created even more problems, in effect downgrading their rivalries with Chicago and St. Louis, as well as Columbus’ attempt to piggyback off of the University of Michigan –Ohio State University rivalry in the NCAA ranks.

The Central Division has been one of the league’s best in recent years, so I’d be happy to see those five squads remain together, while welcoming Minnesota and Winnipeg.  Similarly, there was really no way to break up the hostile Northeast or Atlantic Division rivalries.  The solution?  Strip down the remaining Southeast Division teams so that the two Florida squads join those of the old Northeast, and Carolina and Washington join the big boys in the Atlantic.  For Washington, this could really help take grudges with teams like Pittsburgh and the Rangers to new heights, while fans of the Northeast making their retirement homes in the state of Florida would be excited to see their true home teams in person more often.

Of course, this system is not without flaws.  The most obvious flaw is the lack of competitive balance across conferences.  Again, two conferences would consist of seven teams and two conferences would consist of eight.  Quite simply, this puts some teams at a disadvantage before the puck is even dropped.

Does this system foreshadow expansion?  How about contraction (not likely, as this would almost certainly cause the NHLPA to strike)?  For a system that mathematicians don’t need to tell you would work better with either 28 or 32 teams, really the only benefit would be that less shuffling would need to be done should existing teams relocate in the near future.  For example, the Phoenix Coyotes could move to Quebec City and easily maneuver out of the eight team Conference A and settle into an additional spot in seven team Conference C without any of the other teams being displaced.

But would this really be the best business plan for the NHL?  It seems like operating under such pretenses would only continue down the same dark road in this period of unrest.  Though it would likely strengthen the existing franchises to cut off the fat weighing them down (and improve the on-ice competition at the same time), I realize there is no way that contraction will happen.  Intrigued as I am to see hockey return to areas of past glory or to start anew in cities that want (deserve?) to have a team, I see this right now being better solved by relocation than expansion.  Sorry if your city no longer has a team or never had one to begin with, but the “Original 30” is an exclusive club.

Really the biggest reason for the NHL to expand isn’t for realignment, scheduling, or competitive balance.  It’s for money.  Owners who may have lost a few pennies during this lockout may be even more resolved to open up their club to two new members than those who previously opposed it, as long as they make out well in the form of the corresponding expansions fees.

Earlier this week, Bleacher Report attempted to apply the National Football League model to realign a 32 team NHL.  In the NFL-style model, each conference would contain four divisions of four teams.  Unfortunately for their suggested groupings, none were without problems in breaking up key rivalries.  Comparing this again to the NFL, why else would the Dallas Cowboys have remained in the NFC East post-realignment?  Because the NFL was smart enough to realize the immense importance of the franchise’s rivalries within the division, especially with the Washington Redskins.  The NHL would be foolish to split up Boston and Montreal, Montreal and Toronto, Detroit and Chicago, etc.

Boston and Montreal are perhaps the NHL’s most historic rivals; Mandatory Credit: Steve Babineau, NHLI via Getty Images

Back to the NHL’s Radical Realignment model, a caveat to the new system that many traditional fans have been calling for since it went away (due to the alignment/playoff format that has been in place since 1992-93), was that teams would have to play their way out of their own division (“conference”) in the playoffs.

What a great nod to the good ol’ days.  As New England Sports Network analyst Jack Edwards put it, “You should play out of your division in the playoffs.  That’s what makes rivalries so bitter.  Why do you think the Bruins hate Montreal?  Is it because of all those regular season games?  No, it’s because of all the hatred built up from all the playoff agony over the years.”

Edwards hit the nail on the head.  I absolutely love this old school aspect of the new proposal.  As this upcoming season’s condensed schedule is sure to demonstrate, familiarity breeds contempt.  While most people seem to be back on the “play-your-way-out” bandwagon right now, it’s important to take a look at why this format was changed in the first place: many fans felt that such familiarity actually made for stale, repetitive match-ups.

Well, Edwards has an answer for this one, too.  In fact, his solution may even help to negate the issue of competitive balance between unbalanced divisions.  In his playoff model, which works off of the NHL’s Radical plan, the four “conferences” divide into pairs of divisions within an Eastern and Western Conference.  Each of the top three teams in each division qualify for the playoffs and are seeded as such, with the fourth seed in each divisional playoff tournament being determined by the next two teams in the conference with the highest point totals.  Should both of these teams come from the same division, the 5^th place team in that division would be flipped over to the 4^th seed in the other division in their conference, where they would have a chance to play their way out of that division.

Should the NHL elect to work off of the framework of their Radical Realignment proposal, as well as revert to having teams play their way out of their division, I find Edwards’ solution to be rather ingenious.  Fans will still get to see plenty of hated rivals match up with each other in the first two rounds of divisional playoffs, while still having the possibility of a more unique matchup or two when their team slides over to compete in the conference’s other division.  Even when a team’s divisional rival finishes as a 5^th seed and is flipped to the other division, there is still the chance the two could meet up in the conference finals, where a rivalry is even further enhanced.

For my money, this is the way the NHL should go.  I don’t necessarily have a problem with the current two conference/six division format, but I do find this to be an improvement.  Furthermore, I’m a big proponent of keeping an unbalanced schedule that is heaviest within division, and heavier in within a team’s own conference than in the other one.  Again, this helps to facilitate rivalries.  It also ensures that teams need to get up for big games within their division/conference, where the impact of two points can be a four point swing.