http://sports.espn.go.com/nhl/news/story?id=2706469



New set-up would keep teams closer to home
ESPN.com news services

The NHL has floated the idea of realigning its six current divisions into four, mainly aligned with time zones, according to a story on TSN of Canada's Web site.

Scott Burnside's take
Scott Burnside
The plan to realign the divisions is ludicrous when given the problems facing the NHL, Scott Burnside writes.

According to the report, six club executives met with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman this week to consider potential plans. They're taking ideas from those talks back to their teams, TSN reported.

Among the ideas:

• Reducing the current six divisions to four, with two in the Eastern Conference and two in the Western Conference. There would be one eight-team division and one seven-team division in each conference.

• The top two finishers in each division would be guaranteed the top four playoff seeds. The four other playoff qualifiers in each conference would be based on point totals.

• The Northeast Division -- which includes Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Buffalo and Boston -- would remain intact and add two other teams to form a seven-team division. Pittsburgh is one of those teams that would join the Northeast, sources told TSN.

• The current Atlantic Division (the three New York-area teams plus Philadelphia) would join the four teams from the current Southeast Division (all but one of Washington, Carolina, Atlanta, Tampa Bay and Florida).

• The eight-team division in the Western Conference would feature all teams in Pacific or Mountain time zones (Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Anaheim, Los Angeles, San Jose, Colorado and Phoenix).

• The seven-team division in the Western Conference would feature teams that are in either the Central or Eastern time zones.

The NHL is considering the changes to help with travel and to keep televised games in the same time zones to maximize ratings.

FWIW if the rumors of Pittsburgh looking to go to Portland, Houston, LV, Houston or Winnipeg end up happening there should be a clause that moves Detroit East. I mean why should Eastern teams have to go to play the Pens out west? or why should Western teams play Detroit in the east if a better system could happen following a team's relocation. It would be nice to get another East team to go west so that the orginal 6 could be in one division.

I like that idea, and was wondering about Pittsburgh myself, because their arena deal fell through and LeMieux said yesterday they will look to relocate.
I also think renaming the divisions and conferences would be nice. Go back to Norris and Adams, and even call one division "Original Six". The generic renaming of the conferences took some character out of hockey. Hockey will never be "mainstream", so I like the idea of giving the game character. The NCAA did a nice job by calling their palyoffs the "Frozen Four", the NHL could use something like that in my opinion.

I highly doubt that the Wings move East anytime soon.

The Wings are one of the few teams in the West with an established history and tradition. Moving the Wings out of the conference would hurt a lot of the teams in the WC in terms of attendance and sales, as the Wings have a large fan base.

Also, I don't think that the NHL would put 5 of the Original Six teams in one conference.

Yeah, you're right. The NHL fans in America, all 37 of them, would riot at the thought of tearing down that wonderful tradition of Detroit being a Western Conference team.

The fans won't care. But the league will.

The league is losing money. And if you move Detroit to the East, that's death knell for most of the teams in the WC. You might as well forget that the WC even exists.

Most of us have forgotten that the NHL exists.

Detroit disappointed with realignment proposals

The Detroit Red Wings are upset that the NHL would even consider giving the Columbus Blue Jackets preferential treatment in a proposed realignment plan.

It’s only a concept initiated by a committee of six teams and might not even make it to a vote by the entire Board of Governors, but the proposal would reduce the number of divisions from six to four and have Columbus and Atlanta swap conferences.

“We were very disappointed when that committee (recommended) that we stay in the West and Columbus go to the East. That is absurd,” Wings vice president Jimmy Devellano said. “If there’s a team that moves to the Eastern Conference, it better be the Detroit Red Wings, not the Columbus Blue Jackets. … You’re talking about an Original Six team with 81 years in the league.”

Wings owner Mike Ilitch expressed those feelings in a phone call to NHL commissioner Gary Bettman after details of this plan surfaced last week.

The proposal features an eight- and a seven-team division in each conference. The Wings would be grouped with Chicago, St. Louis, Nashville, Minnesota, Dallas and Atlanta. Columbus would join Pittsburgh and the five current Northeast Division clubs (Buffalo, Boston, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal).

“It’s stupid, it makes no sense,” Devellano said. “There’s nothing broken. Why do we have to restructure the whole league? That’s silly.”

He said the Wings would love to move to the East but can accept the current format. The only change he’d advocate is reducing the number of divisional games from eight to six per opponent and using those additional eight games for more interconference play.

That’s apparently not good enough for Dallas, Minnesota and Columbus, teams at the forefront of this movement. Dallas, which logs even more air miles than the Wings, wants to be aligned with Detroit, St. Louis and Nashville instead of the West Coast teams to cut down on travel. Minnesota would also welcome joining a division with Detroit, Chicago and St. Louis and not play the Western Canada clubs (Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton) as often. And Blue Jackets general manager Doug MacLean told the Columbus Dispatch that, as much as he’d miss being separated from Detroit, his club would relish a move to the East.

The Board of Governors will further explore the possibility while meeting in Dallas during the All-Star break Jan. 22-24. Devellano wasn’t sure if any realignment proposal would be approved, but he acknowledged the difficulty of getting two-thirds of the owners to agree on anything.

He does believe, however, that most owners would prefer six divisions instead of four because winning a division title means a lot more to some teams than it does to the Wings.
http://www.mlive.com/redwings/stories/index.ssf?/base/sports-1/1165950602121360.xml&coll=1