On Frozen Blog

I have six principles guiding a much-needed, rigorous realignment of NHL teams for the 2009-10 season. They are:

(1) There is widespread support among general managers, owners, players, media, the presidential candidates, and hockey fans to have the Alexander Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby rivalry, such as it is, coronated formally in a largely reconstituted Patrick division. In so doing, one of the league’s fiercest set of division rivals would be getting back to hating one another nightly as they should. April’s Washington-Philadelphia seven-gamer offered a powerful reminder of the Patrick’s lasting legacy. This would also right the grievous wrong the league perpetrated on the Capitals a decade ago in removing them from one of sports’ best divisions.

(2) Expansion — to 32 teams — is inevitable. The revenues the league has enjoyed in three successive post-lockout seasons indicate it. My new-look league, initially unbalanced by 16 teams in one conference and 14 in the other, is perfectly structured to accommodate the new arrivals. This inevitable expansion is virtually certain to be located out West, be it in Houston, Las Vegas, Kansas City, Seattle, Portland, or Winnipeg.

(3) Geographic region names for divisions and conferences are for sucks. They are characterless. The NHL had it right pre-Bettman, honoring the game’s builders by affiliating their names with individual divisions, and just as importantly, the league’s gained nothing by vanilla-ing their identity away from it. So Norris, Patrick and Smythe are returned. But in a tip of the hat to the new, the two conferences aren’t rigidly structured by East and West and instead are designated under perhaps the two greatest player names in hockey history: Howe and Orr.

(4) There is something unrivaled in all of professional sports with the cache of the NHL’s Original Six teams, and so those six clubs, housed together for the first time since pre-’67, become the centerpiece of my alignment overhaul.

(5) Forever has Detroit wanted to move to an Eastern time zone conference affiliation, and with this overhaul the Wings will.

(6) A largely balanced schedule is in the best interest of the sport. There would be home and aways with every team in the league, every season. That would mean about 50 games out of your division and about 30 within. The majority of games within conference. This seems about right. Everybody sees Sidney, everybody sees Alex, everybody gets to see every star every season. Out of principle. What has been in place under Bettman has bred numbing repetition and indifference, and indefensible geographic isolation.

Other Benefits. Mercifully, the NASCAR division — since it can’t be uniformly euthanized — is coherently structured with Washington’s removal and Nashville’s addition. A half dozen genuinely hate-based rivalries of today, in a 30-team league, would be doubled or even tripled in this new configuration. The Patrick and Original Six divisions would likely play their division foes to near 100 percent attendance capacity each night, every season. The addition of a team in Las Vegas — a Sin City locale for a league full of sin on every shift — would create instant buzz generally and especially pizzaz within a West-configurated division named after Foster Hewitt.

This realignment would be executed in time for the 2009-10 season, with the Orr and Howe conferences unbalanced in number of teams for a year or two to allow time to expand in two more markets, both of which would join the Howe conference.

We can quibble on the reorienting of one or three specific franchises, but the heart of this matter is getting Sid and Alex and the Atlantic region reconfigured together, Detroit appropriately accommodated to a largely Eastern schedule, inevitable expansion seamlessly slotted in, and the Original Six ascending to a perch known by no other division in the entirety of the professional sports landscape.