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NHL realignment: Jackets happy with final decision
New setup reduces trips west, brings more teams from east

By Aaron Portzline
The Columbus Dispatch Tuesday December 6, 2011 5:02am

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — The Blue Jackets did not realize a dream as old as the franchise last night, one of leaping to the Eastern Conference, where travel is friendly and the potential for short-drive rivalries is robust.

But given where the Jackets could have ended up in the worst-case scenarios of NHL realignment, last night’s news from the league’s Board of Governors meetings was deemed an overwhelming positive.

The Blue Jackets will begin play next season in an eight-team conference that will also have Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Minnesota, Nashville, St. Louis and Winnipeg.

More important, the NHL’s adoption of a four-conference format and a new scheduling matrix will cut the Blue Jackets’ trips to western Canada and California in half.

“This is a fantastic night for the Blue Jackets,” club president Mike Priest said. “This is what’s right for the league, but it’s also something that will make a big, big difference for our franchise, both on the ice and off the ice. This is huge.”

The NHL went for sweeping changes rather than minor tweaks. The new format calls for four conferences that have yet to be named. Every club in the league will play a home-and home with all teams outside their conference. The rest of the 82-game schedule will be fulfilled against conference opponents.

For the Blue Jackets, that means a home-and-home series against the 22 clubs not in their conference (44 games), with the remaining 38 games to be divvied among their seven conference opponents.

“Our fans really want it, and I think it’s important for every city to see every team,” general manager Scott Howson said. “This takes away one western Canada trip and one California trip from us each season. Once we settled that, we didn’t have a strong preference where we ended up, but we’re really pleased with the way it ended up.”

According to TSN, a sports network in Canada, 26 of the 30 clubs supported the proposal, six more than necessary.

“This is not something that everybody gets the first choice on,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said. “If you ask 30 clubs, you get 30 different solutions. That’s what makes this a difficult process.”

The Stanley Cup playoff format hasn’t much mattered in Columbus in the past 11 seasons, but that format is going to change next season, too. The top four clubs in each conference will make the playoffs, and the first two rounds of the playoffs will be played in-conference. It will be 1 vs. 4 and 2 vs. 3 in the first round, with the winners meeting in the second.

Bettman said it was undecided whether the winners of each conference will be reseeded for the final two rounds or if the existing East-vs.-West format will remain.

After months of discussions and back-door dealings, only about one hour of last night’s meeting was spent on realignment.

“It came together pretty quickly,” Howson said.

The last governor to speak before the vote was taken was Priest, who has been a member of the board for less than five years.

“Mike gave an extensive presentation,” Howson said. “He spoke probably longer than anybody else. And I had a few people approach me afterward and say how persuasive they thought he was, how convincing that this was the right path for the league to take.”

Heading into the meeting, Blue Jackets officials feared that the team could get left behind in the Western Conference if a bloc of Eastern Conference owners resisted adding to their travel and forced the rest of the league to adopt a simpler form of realignment.

That might have kept the current league format intact, except that Winnipeg would have moved to the Central Division and one of the clubs from the Central — Detroit or Columbus — would have gone to the Eastern Conference.

In that scenario, Detroit probably would have been first in line to head east, leaving the Blue Jackets without the opponent that is the biggest draw in Nationwide Arena and leaving them as the only Eastern-time-zone club in the Western Conference.

“That would have been a bad situation,” Howson said.

The Blue Jackets say they get additional revenue of almost $75,000 per game — tickets, merchandise, etc. — when an Eastern Conference club plays in Nationwide. Now, all 15 of them will come.

“It gives us a chance to grow our revenues,” Howson said. “We’re going to see an uptick in our per-game revenue because we’ll be seeing more teams from the East, and we’re not losing Detroit.”

Further, the new format will be far less taxing on players. The Blue Jackets will still play the majority of their road games outside the Eastern time zone, but only eight will be in the Pacific and Mountain time zones.

That will help ease the wear and tear on players; plus, it will put more road games on TV at a watchable hour for fans in Columbus.


With the Jackets

The Jackets will join seven teams in one of four new conferences:

Dallas

Detroit

Columbus

Chicago

Minnesota

Nashville

St. Louis

Winnipeg

NHL conferences

The lineups of the three other conferences that start play next season:

• Anaheim, Calgary, Colorado, Edmonton, Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Jose, Vancouver

• Boston, Buffalo, Florida, Montreal, Ottawa, Tampa Bay, Toronto

• Carolina, New Jersey, N.Y. Islanders, N.Y. Rangers, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington