Proposed four-division format holds needed changes

	The Islanders and Rangers have a storied rivalry that can easily be shortchanged by the current playoff format. Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
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There may yet be a change in the way the NHL schedules games next season, but divisional realignment looks less likely than it did when the much-needed concept first was floated before Christmas.

You can understand the desire to avoid a knee-jerk decision based on where a couple of young superstars are playing, but there's a larger competitive issue that the league can't afford to miss.

The plan that the Board of Governors will discuss while meeting in Dallas during the All-Star break (Jan. 22-24) was crafted by a committee comprised of one representative from each of the six current divisions. It would reduce the number of divisions to four as part of an effort to ensure that fans could see every other team at least once each season.

The committee also proposed flip-flopping the Thrashers and Blue Jackets into opposite conferences. While Columbus would welcome the move, word is that Atlanta has lobbied hard and will stay in the East. Common sense prevailed here. There's no advantage to moving the Thrashers away from geographical rivals in Carolina, Tampa Bay and Florida. And while Columbus wouldn't be a bad fit for the East, there's no glaring need to make that move.

Any team from the West that wants to switch conferences needs to get in line behind the Red Wings. An Original Six team whose fans suffer through 16 road games that start at 9:30 p.m. local time or later, Detroit is one of at least four clubs -- along with Dallas, Minnesota and the Blue Jackets -- that are having major issues with the current situation.

While it's obvious that there's no solution that will make everyone happy, there are accommodations that can -- and should -- be made. The current proposal calls for the divisional breakdown to go like this:

Northeast: Montreal, Boston, Buffalo, Toronto, Ottawa, Pittsburgh and Washington.

Southeast: Rangers, Islanders, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Carolina, Atlanta, Tampa Bay and Florida

Central: Detroit, Columbus, Nashville, St. Louis, Dallas, Minnesota and Chicago

Pacific: San Jose, Anaheim, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Colorado, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary.

When you think about where each team is situated, this solution adequately addresses the two major concerns of the Western Conference teams: travel time/expenses and television scheduling. There'll be resistance, particularly from the Southeast and other relatively new teams that place some marketing value on being a regular season divisional champ. Two less divisions will mean two fewer opportunities to hang one of those "illustrious" banners. But this is one of those greater-good scenarios that should get approval from the necessary two-thirds majority.

If this does pass, it'd be a nice nod to the past if they dropped those geographic designations and brought back the classic division names. But if Patrick, Norris, Smythe and Adams aren't deemed to have the same cache as they once did, today's fans certainly would appreciate divisions named Gretzky, Orr, Howe and Sawchuk. It would be a fitting way to honor those greats (and hey, the old guys Smythe, Adams, Norris and Patrick already have trophies named after them, anyway).

But just going to four divisions isn't going far enough. The real allure to this plan is the chance it offers to revert to a playoff structure that gives meaning to divisional play.

The NHL tried to create heightened rivalries through additional divisional games with the scheduling system that was put in place after the lockout. The reason the approach is failing is that the current conference-based playoff set-up renders divisions obsolete once the winners have been given their top-three seeding. A team can, conceivably, see postseason action for years without once meeting a divisional foe. And it's these tilts, not the quirks of geography, that give weight to those dead-of-winter matches that now blend seamlessly one to the next. Just watch any game between Dallas and Edmonton -- two distant clubs that have met six times in the postseason since 1997 -- for all the proof you need of that.

If teams are forced to fight their way through two rounds of divisional play before playing for a conference championship and a Stanley Cup Finals berth, as they did from 1981-93, those rivalries will blossom. We might even get back some of the nasty edge that the games have been missing since the lockout.

You'll also get the occasional situation where the sixth-place team in one division had a better record than the fourth in another, but that's a price worth paying to give games 1 through 82 more value.