No.
The National Hockey League will never get realignment "right." Ever. We'll always have something to complain about. Get used to it.
As long as 30 (and soon to be 32) teams unequally divided due to geography have to be plunked down into four, six or eight divisions within two conferences, things will not be in their rightful place.
Is it the worst thing in the world that Florida and Tampa Bay are in a division with Detroit and Boston? No. Remember, the Lightning played with the Red Wings, North Stars, Blackhawks and Blues upon entering the league in 1992.
The well-defined chaos the league brain trust finds itself in at various intervals is nothing new to students of history.
Before the Original Six became venerated, there were 10 NHL teams in the early 1930s, split into two groups: American and Canadian. Since there were more of the former than the latter, the New York Americans drew the short straw and went rogue with their Northern neighbors.
In 1967, it first sought to place all six expansion teams -- ranging from Philadelphia in the East to Los Angeles in the West -- into the "West" Division while the Original Six played in the "East." Then, once Buffalo and Vancouver entered the league three years later, Chicago was bumped to the "West" to maintain "competitive balance," but it didn't solve the problem of a team located near the Pacific playing in the East.
Once the venture grew to 18 clubs with the admissions of Washington and Kansas City in 1974, all normalcy was dumped. The original Norris Division contained Montreal and Los Angeles. The Adams Division looked OK with Boston, Buffalo and Toronto, but had to sneak California in there. The only division that remotely looked decent with respect to geography was the Patrick, containing both New York teams, the Flyers and Atlanta.
Admission of the four former WHA teams in 1979 did little to quell the riot. Hartford was lumped in with the Norris, Quebec along with Minnesota in the Adams. One year later, when the Flames relocated to Calgary, they remained in the Patrick with the Flyers, Islanders, Rangers and Capitals.
The closest the league came to perfecting their task was in 1981, when a proper geographic alignment was proposed along the four divisions and legendary names that everyone seems to want back.
Patrick: New York Islanders, New York Rangers, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington
Adams: Boston, Buffalo, Montreal, Hartford, Quebec
Norris: Chicago, Minnesota, Winnipeg, St. Louis, Toronto, Detroit
Smythe: Edmonton, Calgary, Colorado, Los Angeles, Vancouver
That was a rare trip into common sense for the NHL, which spent more than a decade flailing at common sense as it grew unchecked before arriving on something akin to sanity. Blind squirrel, nut, and so forth.
For the next 12 seasons, the league existed in a relative state of harmony with an imbalanced schedule that wasn't too far out of whack. You played your division foes seven or eight times, everybody else three times with home and road flipped each season. The lone blip on the radar in the first decade was the Jets' move to the Smythe once the Rockies fled Denver for New Jersey in 1982. And that was solved by playing back-to-back sets in all five Smythe cities to cut down on travel.
Even then, one thing was amiss: the playoff structure. While encouraging and fostering rivalries since the first two rounds were inter-divisional, the 1-4, 2-3 formats, it was hypothetical that a fifth place club in one division would miss out while a fourth-place team in another was relatively weak but rewarded for finishing one slot higher.
That hypothetical came to fruition in 1988, when the Penguins and Rangers missed out on the playoffs in a stacked six-team Patrick Division, while the Maple Leafs -- the league's second-worst team -- made it to the postseason for being fourth in a weak Norris Division.
Forgetting the riot which ensued when the founders' division names were replaced by geographic ones in 1993 once Gary Bettman took the reins, the inter-conference 1-through-8 playoff structure was the right move at the right time.
Once the NHL moved into the six-division format five years later, there have been complaints that a division winner in a weak group could finish third over the fourth, fifth and sometimes sixth-seeded teams with better records. Washington was shoehorned into the Southeast -- almost 400 miles from its closest rival and more than 1,000 from its furthest -- and so was Winnipeg for the last two seasons. Dallas was picked to head a weak Pacific Division out of desire for competitive balance next to Detroit and Colorado.
So now, we get what we get and we all have to deal. It wouldn't be a plan if something wasn't crooked.
Until the next bright idea comes along with expansion, relocation, or the three-year playoff experiment runs its course.
Then, we'll crank up our inner George Carlin and rail at the inequity of it all, conveniently forgetting everything that came before.
No comments:
Post a Comment