The 2021-Only NHL East Division Whips Ass and It Should Stick Around
So I had something much longer and shittier written out where I was going over various sports leagues and their responses to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and it was just long and drawn out and taking forever to get around to what I really wanted to talk about, which is how glad I am to see a one-year reprieve from the worst and dumbest professional sports league division in America.
The Once and Future Eastern Conference (2013–2020, 2021-???)
Back in 2013 the then-30-team NHL realigned from six divisions to four in preparation to expand to 31 teams by the year 2017 and 32 teams by the year 2021. I am positive that the same league that jerk-off-motioned nine new franchises into existence between 1991 and 2000 did not require an eight-year lead time on turning two 15-team conferences into two 16-team conferences, but that’s really neither here nor there! The NHL has a long and storied tradition of constant realignment and relocation and 2013 was as good a time as any to mix things up again. But, holy shit — take a look at what they did!
I have never understood the concepts or constraints that shaped the new alignment of the NHL Eastern Conference, but it seems very clear that it was formed by first compiling the Metropolitan Division (the three New York area teams, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, Carolina, and Columbus) and then just calling the remaining eight teams — six of which are not located on the Atlantic Coast — the Atlantic Division.
This is dumb and bad! Just by playing connect-the-dots and making convex hulls for each division, as I have done in the image above, we can see how the Metropolitan Division is entirely contained within the Atlantic. A little overlap in divisional alignments is more than forgivable, but for one division to be an enclave within the other is a dead giveaway that somebody fell asleep at the wheel here. Look at the makeup of the Atlantic. It contains the three Eastern Canadian teams, two Floridian teams, and the disparate “northern USA cities” trio of Boston, Buffalo, and Detroit. This is a non-cohesive collection of cast-offs a with no shared identity or reason to exist.
Think of how much better and cleaner this becomes just by swapping the Islanders and Rangers with the Lightning and Panthers. Now you’ve got a clear-cut North-and-South divide with Canada, New England, New York, and Michigan on one side and the rest of the Eastern U.S. on the other. Or for more of a coastal vs. inland divide, lump the two Floridian teams in with the six in the Boston-Washington megalopolis. An East-West divide appears if you go with Boston-Washington plus Montreal and Ottawa. There’s no natural and ideal way to split these sixteen teams into two divisions, but there are so many better ways to do it than what they landed on, which I can only cynically describe as “ensure that Crosby’s Penguins and Ovechkin’s Capitals are playing in the New York area as often as possible.”
This has been how the Eastern Conference looks for seven years now and it will be how it looks for the foreseeable future. Yuck!
The NHL East Division, a 2021 Limited Time Offer
Here and now in 2021, the NHL would like to begin another season amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The league finished last season by pulling every playoff team into Canada and having two joint NBA-style bubbles for like a month or two, but the logistics of doing something like that for an entire season are insurmountable. On the other hand, taking the NFL’s approach of proceeding with business as usual is a non-starter for the NHL due to the indefinite closure of the Canada-U.S. border. So instead the NHL will do what the NHL does best: realign!
Sometimes designers work best under heavy constraints. With real world geopolitics segregating the 24 U.S. teams from the seven Canadian teams, those seven Canadian teams can do nothing but stay north of the border and exclusively play against each other for the entire duration of the shortened season. And once that’s the case for nearly a quarter of the league, it is very natural and straightforward to go right ahead and divide the 24 remaining teams into three more closed off divisions — say, a West, a Central, and an East. And oh my God, behold what a beauty the NHL East is.
It’s everything I never knew I wanted it to be! With the Canadian teams out of the picture, Boston looks back down the I-95 corridor toward its natural American rivals. Detroit and Columbus turn westward and leave to join up with Midwestern regional rival Chicago, but Buffalo and Pittsburgh remain in the East with intrastate rivals in New York and Philadelphia. And on the southern tip of the division there’s enough room for Washington, but not for Carolina, let alone Florida.
This footprint is nothing short of breathtaking. It is beautiful and very nearly symmetrical, an arrowhead, a speartip, a kite. It is compact and concise, Kansas-sized, Dakota-sized, and you could drive from any part of it to another in the course of a workday. But it is also complete. Nobody seems left out. Just eight natural and historical rivals hashing out their shit on ice rinks in the American Northeast. What more could you want from a sports division? It is perfect.
But like all good things, it will come to an end. Currently the league plans to add an expansion team in Seattle this coming fall and enjoy a full 2021–22 season free of any travel restrictions between the United States and Canada. In the East, the Canadian, Floridian, Carolinian, and Rust Belt teams will return from Rumspringa, and the eight-team East Division will balloon once more into the sixteen-team Eastern Conference and it will retain its terrible and nonsensical Atlantic-Metropolitan partition.
So if ever there were a year for me to take the leap from casual playoff hockey fan to regular season hockey enthusiast, it would be this one. For one year only — really, for four months only — my hometown Boston Bruins will be free from the burden of playing games in Ottawa, Michigan, and Miami. Instead I’ll be fed a steady diet of high stakes games against the likes of the Flyers, Rangers, Penguins, and Capitals. I am absolutely ready to watch the NHL more than ever before in an abbreviated 2021 sea —
Oh fuck all of this!
