WEIRd NAMES + WILd cARdS
If the NHL’s realignment was intended to make half the teams happy and the other half mad, the league has succeeded brilliantly
First impressions of the National Hockey League’s geographybased realignment scheme:
■ Winnipeg, about the central-est place in the centre of Canada, moving to the Central Division is so crazy, it just might work.
■ Six of the eight teams in the Atlantic Division are not actually on the Atlantic, but Boston and Florida are, which is nice.
■ Metropolitan is the nicest thing Raleigh, Newark and Columbus have ever been called. ■ But if the grand design is a 32-team league, get ready for another realignment in three years because the West, already two teams shy of numerical equality, is going to need, at minimum, one Eastern “volunteer” or it’s never going to catch up.
Any other grand conclusions will have to wait — like eight months, or so.
Yes, with only 14 teams in the conference, a Western club will have a 57 per cent chance of qualifying for the post-season, while it will be 50/50 for an Eastern squad, an imbalance that doesn’t make the Eastern comrades in the NHL Players’ Association happy, or the Eastern owners, GMs or coaches, either.
Even in as random a game as hockey, the laws of probability still apply over an 82-game test.
But back in the days of the 21-team NHL, the Patrick Division had six teams and the other three had five, so the league has been unbalanced before, and will be again.
Boiled down to its essence, the top eight teams in each conference qualified for the post-season before realignment, and — give or take the anomaly of a slightly sub-standard squad getting in by finishing third in a weaker division — still will in the new world.
Good teams will make it, bad teams won’t, and mediocre teams will be on the bubble.
Besides, it’s considered bad form to complain about a schedule that has every team visiting every city every year: a long overdue admission, on the NHL’s part, that fans are more than ATMs with legs. The paying customers won’t be bludgeoned, not as badly anyway, with a steady diet of games against teams in the division.
The schedule will remain division-heavy, but not as cloying as before — in the East, only 30 of the 82 games will be played within the division (29 in the West) — but the first two rounds of playoffs will be, theoretically, internal.
That could change, though, depending how the standings play out.
The top three teams in each division qualify, plus two wild-cards, regardless of division. The top finisher among division winners plays the lowest-ranked wild-card (possibly from the other division) in the first round, the other division winner plays the other wild-card, while the second and third-place teams in each division play one another.
If a wild-card team upsets a division winner, the idea of the second round being entirely within the division wouldn’t necessarily happen, either.
If this all sounds confusing, look on the bright side: it could be baseball, where half the teams are out of it by the all-star break, and you need a slide-rule to figure out the wild-card possibilities.
Realignment’s early winners and losers aren’t so hard to identify. Detroit is back in the East, where it belongs — and in a division with three other Original Six teams, to boot: Boston, Montreal and Toronto. That will make for good nostalgia, but qualifying for the playoffs just got harder for both the Leafs and Canadiens.
The Red Wings’ travel gets exponentially better, too, as does the Jets’, and Columbus fans don’t have to stay up past midnight to watch their team play. Dallas, too, is relieved of having to play division games two time zones away in California.
Life got a little easier for the Stanley Cup-champion Chicago Blackhawks, with the Red Wings no longer in their rear-view mirror, although they still have the St. Louis Blues to contend with in the new Central, along with Minnesota, Nashville, Colorado, Dallas and Winnipeg.
“If you deserve to make the playoffs, you will make the playoffs,” Flyers centre Claude Giroux said, a couple of weeks back — an assertion that’s probably not all that comforting to the Washington Capitals, who might be the most obvious loser in the shakeup.
The Caps go from the old Southeast Division, which they dominated against teams in Winnipeg, Carolina, Tampa Bay and Florida, to the new Metropolitan with, among others, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, the Rangers and the vastly-improved Islanders.
“We’ve snuck in playing in that Southeast Division a couple of times and we won’t have that luxury,” admitted Caps defenceman Karl Alzner, at the Canadian Olympic camp in late August. “But it’ll keep us a little more honest, which is probably a good thing.”
The Vancouver Canucks could probably say the same, having cruised along in the old Northwest on a steady diet of ordinary opponents including Calgary, Edmonton and Colorado and, at times, Minnesota. Like the Caps, they have been found wanting in the playoffs.
Grouped now with two teams that seem to have their number — the L.A. Kings and San Jose Sharks — the Canucks appear destined for a dogfight for the third guaranteed playoff spot in the Pacific with the Anaheim Ducks and the young, gifted Edmonton Oilers, and maybe even the plucky Phoenix Coyotes.
If the goal was to make half the teams happy and half unhappy, the NHL may have succeeded brilliantly.
Which are which? Ask again next June.