After examining all of the simple changes that could take place to the NHL Realignment based on the Coyotes moving, it’s time to look at breaking the paradigm a bit more.

Since 1998 the NHL has had six divisions, each composing of five teams, this came after expansion made the four divisions of six-seven teams model obsolete. This has led to some strange peculiarities like Dallas sharing a division with San Jose while Minnesota shares one with Vancouver, not to mention Winnipeg being joined with Tampa Bay.

The scenarios I looked at before were unable to completely fix these problems, hell the plan that the NHL pushed had the Florida teams listed as “Northeast”, which we can all laugh at for a moment or two. Maybe the five-team division model just doesn’t work with the current distribution of teams in the NHL, and maybe it never really did work.

In this post, we’ll look at inverting that model, instead of six divisions of five, let’s for for ten divisions of three. Clearly there needs to be an even number of divisions, keeping with the current set up of two Conferences— although five divisions of six can actually work nicely— maybe we’ll cover that one later.

Admittedly, I got this idea from Tom Fulery, who looked at this possibility with a Phoenix move to Quebec. I’ll take it one step further and examine the options depending on the Coyotes moving to Seattle, and Kansas in this post, with Quebec, Hamilton, Las Vegas, and Phoenix examined later on this week.

Should they move to Seattle, which I still think is the most likely scenario, obviously a Seattle team should share a division with Vancouver, so there are two teams covered. Geographically, the third team would either be San Jose or one of the Alberta teams, but both of them are probably taken. The Alberta teams should stay together, and so should the California teams, meaning their third team would most certainly be Colorado. This enables an All-California division, and a Winnipeg-Calgary-Edmonton option.

Letting the dominoes fall, it should end up like this.

I tried to keep the names as standard as possible, with the obvious need to add a few names, including “Empire” which I loved so much that I stole from Tom Fulery as well. The West was pretty easy to figure out and so was most of the East. Obviously Detroit could be moved East instead of Columbus with little need to readjust things. I considered an All-Eastern Canadian division, but Montreal would not want to lose Boston as a rival, so they were kept together, this necessitated Buffalo joining them or else the New York Metro teams would have to be split up. Clearly Columbus could benefit greatly from sharing a division with Toronto, and hey they may end up being the team that moves to Hamilton, so we can avoid the later headache now.

Another, more geographically incongruous option, was to have Toronto-Ottawa-Buffalo, Pittsburgh-Columbus-Philadelphia, then Montreal-Boston-Washington, but I would like to stay as logical as possible, while preserving as many traditional rivalries as we can.

The only real losers I see here are Colorado and St. Louis would both lose some of their stronger rivalries, the Pennsylvania teams would probably like to stay with the New York teams, but they get reunited with Washington which is probably a good thing. Also, the three Southeast teams are really missing any sort of marquee names, but the guarantee of at least one of them in the playoffs could really help sustain these markets.

Now what if we end up with the Kansas City Coyotes? Their obvious divisional opponents would be the cross-state St. Louis Blues. Looking around they are close to Chicago, Colorado, Minnesota, Nashville, and Dallas. As much as they would love to stay with the Hawks, it probably doesn’t make too much sense to take them away from Detroit, same with Nashville. The Avalanche and Wild probably need to join the Jets, leaving the otherwise isolated Stars to join the Missouri dominated division, making everything else look like this.

I tried playing around with an All-Eastern-Canadian Division, which led to a few more dominoes falling. I tried to focus on Geography, which leads to the New York City teams going with Boston — building off of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, and the Devils going with the Flyers and the Capitals. The Pittsburgh-Columbus-Buffalo division is very geographically logical, but separates some big-time NHL rivalries. I guess we could get a Boston-Buffalo-Columbus division, which may make less people unhappy in the long run.

Schedule and Playoffs

The playoffs are pretty easy here, division leaders all make the playoffs, plus the next three best teams. With five divisions, we really don’t need them to be given the top seeds, but a guaranteed playoff spot is good. Since the divisions are so small geographically, the local networks that would have a much higher chance of covering the playoffs.

As for a schedule, I would set it up as follows:

- 8 games against 2 divisional opponents for 16 games
- 3 games against 12 non-divisional in-conference opponents for 36 games (rotate the extra home game every year)
- 2 games against 15 non-conference opponents for 30 games

Lots of in-division games, fair schedule, lower travel time, teams like Detroit and Nashville don’t have to go to California and Western Canada twice a year, every year.

Really, what’s not to like?