NHL realignment with Las Vegas and Quebec

With only two teams actually meeting the NHL expansion deadline, it appears that Las Vegas and Quebec City will be added.  (Unless Seattle gets one last shot…)

This leaves the question of NHL realignment.  The current alignment was only agreed to for 3 years, likely with expansion on everyone’s mind.

With Quebec and Las Vegas, we end up with one team each in the East and West.

Pro Hockey Talk believes that we could move to an 8-division, 4-team format:

West
1. Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg
2. Anaheim, Los Angeles, San Jose, Las Vegas
3. Arizona, Dallas, Colorado, Nashville
4. Minnesota, Chicago, St. Louis, Columbus
East
5. Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City
6. Carolina, Florida, Tampa Bay, Washington
7. NY Rangers, NY Islanders, New Jersey, Buffalo
8. Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston

Cue Blue Jackets fans hollering about moving back to the Western Conference and Caps fans wondering why they have to be in a division with two teams from Florida. The Arizona- Dallas-Colorado-Nashville division is kinda far-flung, too.

The thing is, when it comes to realignment, there’s no perfect solution. Or, if there is, we haven’t seen one.

With an uneven balance of East and West teams, we agree that there is no perfect solution.

Rawcharge discusses the difficulties of keeping the alignment closer to how it stands today:

With a Quebec City franchise in the East and Las Vegas in the West, the Conference differential remains at 2 teams more in the East. Scheduling would be tweaked, but that was going to happen no matter where teams added to the league were located: extra games against in-division and in-conference would be decreased to work the new teams into the schedule.

OK, it’s not going to be that neat and tidy. As it currently stands, some in-division foes face each other five times a season instead of the standard in-division four while playing the other conference teams three times a season. The opposing conference teams are scheduled to be played twice a season.

In the end the breakdown is 30-24-14-14 for the Lightning (to use the Bolts as the example team with the schedule).  Those numbers calculate a little different for the Western Conference teams (29-21-16-16) but it all gets to the nice and neat 82 games.

Using that 4*-3-2-2 divisional schedule breakdown doesn’t work – too many games played.  Switching all non-divisional series to 2 games each leaves a varying number of games that need to be scheduled still to reach 82 for the season.

No matter where it lands, it is going to get very interesting once the new teams are approved.  And as always, we will have winners and losers, celebrations and crying.