Calad
Section 422
Reports from the recent board of governers meetings suggested the league was looking into expanding the schedule to have more reg season and less preseason games, no doubt to drive up the gate revenue. The league realigned about 10 years ago back to a 4 division structure with a divisional playoff citing the desire to "reignite rivalries" and make division games matter. It's been lackluster, scheduling is weird (NYR vs NYI didnt have a game for the first 3 months of the season in 23-24), travel still sucks. Here's my idea to increase games and revenue, foster stronger rivalries, and decrease travel.
Each team plays their division opponents 5 times each. Assuming divisions stay the same (8 teams each), thats 7 teams x 5 games per (since you cant play yourself...) = 35 games.
You play 2 games (1 home 1 away) vs every other team in the league outside your division. Thats 24 teams x 2 games = 48 games.
This totals 83 games, so currently only 1 extra regular season game per team, totaling 16 extra games. However, this should also reduce travel a fair amount, especially for the western conference teams who will travel between the midwest and the west coast roughly half as much.
Playoffs:
Now then, since we're playing a fair amount more of divisional games this gives more weight to the divisional playoff format. Since playing (and winning) your division is a bigger slice of your schedule. This would help mitigate a situation where one division is far stronger than another. In doing this, we can also get rid of the awkward structure of the current wild card. No longer will we have the awkwardness of wildcard teams winning a division which they don't belong to.
For each division, the top 3 seeds are locked in, and seeds 4 and 5 are wild cards, which would play a best of 3 play-in series to advance to the playoffs vs the 1 seed.
This would add another 8-12 games, this time of playoff hockey, with that comes the extra gate/concessions, as well as an excellent opportunity for the league to get a bigger slice of that TV money, which has been responsible the uptick in league revenue with its recent ESPN/TNT deals, and also generally has been a big driver for the rest of the big 4 in recent times.
Hope you like it, have fun tearing it apart
Each team plays their division opponents 5 times each. Assuming divisions stay the same (8 teams each), thats 7 teams x 5 games per (since you cant play yourself...) = 35 games.
You play 2 games (1 home 1 away) vs every other team in the league outside your division. Thats 24 teams x 2 games = 48 games.
This totals 83 games, so currently only 1 extra regular season game per team, totaling 16 extra games. However, this should also reduce travel a fair amount, especially for the western conference teams who will travel between the midwest and the west coast roughly half as much.
Playoffs:
Now then, since we're playing a fair amount more of divisional games this gives more weight to the divisional playoff format. Since playing (and winning) your division is a bigger slice of your schedule. This would help mitigate a situation where one division is far stronger than another. In doing this, we can also get rid of the awkward structure of the current wild card. No longer will we have the awkwardness of wildcard teams winning a division which they don't belong to.
For each division, the top 3 seeds are locked in, and seeds 4 and 5 are wild cards, which would play a best of 3 play-in series to advance to the playoffs vs the 1 seed.
This would add another 8-12 games, this time of playoff hockey, with that comes the extra gate/concessions, as well as an excellent opportunity for the league to get a bigger slice of that TV money, which has been responsible the uptick in league revenue with its recent ESPN/TNT deals, and also generally has been a big driver for the rest of the big 4 in recent times.
Hope you like it, have fun tearing it apart
