With the impending move of the Atlanta Thrasher to Winnipeg, it seems like everyone in the hockey blogosphere is putting their two cents in when it comes to divisional realignment. Had Phoenix moved to Winnipeg this would have been easy, move them to the Northeast, and Colorado to the Pacific, no problemo.
But with an Eastern Team moving West, we have some interesting scenarios. Who moves to the Eastern Conference. Detroit was reportedly promised a move East if it came up, Columbus is the most Eastern team in the Western Conference, and Nashville would be the most logical fit into the Southeast Division. Some rumours have been going around that the league will oddly have Winnipeg play in the Southeast for a year. While this seems stupid, it seems like they want to do a whole new realignment and want to explore it fully in time for the 2012-13 season.
After the lockout, the NHL had an idea of going to back to 4 divisions, similar to what they had up to 1998 when they switched to their six division model. Also, I have read some rumours of the NHL making a Canadian Division, or going for a radical 3 Conference alignment.
I personally am not a huge fan of the 6 divisions that they have now. It gives a huge advantage to anyone playing in a weak division (e.g. the Capitals until this year, or the Canucks now), it puts a huge advantage on the Atlantic Division since they are all in Tri-State Area and don’t have to travel very far, and it makes both the Southeast and the Pacific division pretty lame. Basically they stacked up the traditional rivalries like the Canadian cities and the New York connection, and divided the sunbelt in half and went from there.
So with that in mind and the impending Westward move of the Thrashers, I came up withfive different scenarios. In this post, I’ll examine the first one which is sort of a “Ctrl+Z” of the divisional alignment of the past 13 years.
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Tags: Hockey, Ottawa Senators, Pittsburgh Penguins, Realignment Roulette
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