Arizona moving to the central is already confirmed, but how does Winnipeg being with Arizona, Dallas, and Colorado make sense for them? Maybe swap them and St Louis

Poor Winnipeg, their travel is going to suck. That gives me flashbacks to the old Northwest division Minnesota use to be in.

Rangers and Islanders should ALWAYS be in the same division, as with the devils. if you want to throw a fourth in there i would put the Sabres

this actually doesn't look too bad but like others have said the jets travel would be long. also can't see the New York teams being split up. overall still nice though

If there are still conferences Columbus would 100% veto this plan considering most of their games wouldn't be Eastern time anymore. Switch them in Nashville.

Should keep the three New York Metro teams together and Boston and Montreal together. The East could look something like this:

Div 1 - Boston, Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto
Div 2 - Philadelphia, Columbus, Detroit, Pittsburgh
Div 3 - New York R, New York I, Buffalo, New Jersey
Div 4 - Washington, Carolina, Tampa, Florida

Never going to be perfect with smaller divisions but the major rivals are kept together. Detroit and Washington get the short end of the stick though.

They won't but how is the playoff format?

Would be the division leaders in the top 4 spots and then the next best 4 in the other spots.

I like this because leafs have the habs, sens, and red wings in their division. But in all seriousness, I wonder how the playoffs would work. top two per division? just keep conferences and do the top eight. interesting idea never the less.

The Northwest division is just one massive rivallry

No, I want the division winners to mean something. I like the 4 divisions and top 4 in each making the playoffs. Win your division, win your conference, then the cup

division leaders and then 4 "wildcards" would be my suggestion. Otherwise just straight up 8 best in conference.

As a NSH fan, I strongly dislike this. They are the only team that loses all of their divisional rivals - all other teams have current rivals within their division. You could argue CBJ too, but they used to be in the Central just a few years ago. NSH really gets the short end of the stick here in terms of competition. They've been in the league now for 20+ years and now they lose their CHI, STL, DAL, and WPG rivalries that they've been developing for years. It already happened when DET and CBJ left for the east too. I don't like this for NSH.

I like all the feedback here. Winnipeg really does suck for travel no matter what. My logic was that the difference in travel time isn't that large for flights to ARZ for WPG and STL. The timezones are the big thing. I think you'd see a lot more 7:30 and 8:30 games to split the difference.

Yeah I was torn on that. They could be flipped with CBJ easily. The big thing is I didn't want them having to be with DAL, COL and ARZ because of the time change. It's always dark in Winnipeg so clocks don't matter there lol

I understand the reasoning, and it makes more sense geographically to lump the SE together like that. But for a team that's been in the league for 20+ years now, it's hard to make that change when they are the only team making that sacrifice.

I agree, they should do this. I like the idea, I was thinking of suggesting it myself.

I would consider making a couple of changes to the West -- moving NSH back to the Central and then swapping MIN and DAL to improve travel for WPG. Some changes would need to made for the East with CBJ back, but I think this works for the West at least.

VAN - CGY - EDM - SEA

SJS - LAK - ANA - VGK

ARI - COL - WPG - MIN

DAL - STL - CHI - NSH

https://sportleaguemaps.com/hockey/nhl/

I looked at a map and built it from the corners, from scratch, to see if we agreed.

the Southwest is easy: SJ, VGK, LAK, ANA. Check!
The Southeast is easy: NSH, Car, Fla, TBL. Check!
Northwest is obvious: Sea, Van, Edm, Cgy Check!

Then it gets dicier

On I-95 closest to NYC (although, boy this would be a competitive division some years): NYR, NYI, NJD, Bos. Shortest travel in theory, but worst traffic, so it evens out.
Northeast, closer together: Buf, MTL, Ott, Tor
The ones in the middle in the South: Ari, Dal, Col, STL
Great Lakes: Det, Chi, Min, WPG
No shared regional identity, but they're in the middle, and close together, and have some rivalries, now: Phi, Pit, Wsh, and CBJ.

If two teams per division are guaranteed playoff spots each year, the above guarantees at least two Canadian teams make the playoffs every year. Could see swapping Boston and Buffalo over rivalries or over Buffalo wanting to identify as part of New York, but Boston is closer to NYC, and Buffalo is right by Toronto on the actual map.

Obviously if they really want to go with divisions of four teams, some poor intern would have to sit down and google map all six communtes within each proposed version of each division, and add up travel times at rush hour, to see which made the most sense, but just looking at geographic distance on a map, this is my guess for how it shakes out.

If you do best 8 in the conference what good are the divisions then might as well just make 2 conferences and no divisions. Makes winning a division worthless.

It would only really matter for scheduling because they play each other more often. I like the 4 and 4 wildcards idea though. Just because in my setup there's divisions with 3 strong teams from the getgo with PIT, PHI, WSH or COL, DAL, WPG