My Idea for NHL Realignment: be prepared for more moves
I have a confession to make. I like hockey.
This doesn't make any sense if you know me. I don't have many/any friends who do like hockey, and I'm not athletic. I don't even like any other sport. That said, as a man with Canadian heritage, I've been around hockey the fandom of hockey all of my life, even if going to an NHL game or regularly watching a specific team on TV was something I could rarely do.
So when I follow hockey, I do so through newspapers and the Internet. One story that I have been following closely is divisional realignment as a result of the relocation of the Atlanta Thrashers to Winnipeg.
There have been hundreds if not thousands of ideas spread around the internet regarding realignment of the NHL as a result of this event, all of them flawed and full of potholes that would prevent them from being easy sells in the real NHL.
I'm not going to go over every plan here (there are too many!), but I will say that they all seem to ignore the elephant in the room, namely that there will be another move in the next few years. It will probably be the Phoenix Coyotes, but it could also be any number of other teams.
A key problem is that any realignment which preserves the current six-division format will could be broken by these future moves because they will require key rivalries (think Montreal-Boston or the NYC trio) to be broken up.