I feel like I need to make a note somewhere about why 1/16 happened in the first place [spoiler: the schedule was perfectly balanced, everyone played everyone else 4 times - 2 home, 2 away, no more and no less] and why it's never going to happen again under the current scheduling format and how if it were tried, it would be patently unfair to some group of teams. Then, I can just copy/paste it as needed.
And, I would like to add to that that it seems very true as well that the schedule needs to match the playoff system NO MATTER WHAT THEY ARE.
Let's just try this, for example......
Seattle adds to the league, and we have a 4 x 8 division structure.
The league seems dead set on the home/home, so we will keep that, but we will try 2 different matrices for the rest....
SYSTEM #1:
Versus your entire conference (east or west) you play 3 games. That's 45, to go along with the 32 OOC games, so you have 5 more games. They will be singles against teams in your own division (Rangers v Islanders , eg).
This is a very balanced schedule. The only difference in the schedules across the conference is 5 games.
The playoffs should be 1-8 in this system.
SYSTEM #2:
We play home/home against all the teams in the other 3 division for 48 games.
Remaining 34 games against your own division. In this system, the difference in schedules is 20 games. That's 25% of the year. That's a lot. You can't call this balanced in any sense.
So, in this system, the playoffs should be 1-4 in each division.
Clearly you can create other hypothetical systems as well, but these illustrate the point.
And, further, these 2 are exactly the 2 matrices which best fit the needs of the EAST in the first case, and the WEST in the latter case. And, of course, therein lies the argument.