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Fixing the NHL Schedule
by Alanah McGinley on 11/19/07 at 08:55 PM ET
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From Al Strachan at FoxSports,
But judging by the early returns, the attempts to maintain the current schedule, led by Lou Lamoriello of the New Jersey Devils, will fail. Lamoriello’s dearly beloved concept of eight divisional games per year will be scrapped and reduced to six.
That frees up room to make sure that every team plays each other at least once. The existing format of playing the non-divisional teams in your conference four times — two in each venue — will stay.
So that will give us 24 divisional games, 40 conference games and 15 non-conference games. That’s a total of 79, which should be enough to determine which teams belong in the playoffs. But it’s three short of the existing total and you have to know that there’s no way the governors will voluntarily reduce revenue.
Therefore, the league will add three wild-card games.
Note: Presumably, none of this can be confirmed till after the NHL’s Governors meeting on November 29th. This issue was also addressed briefly by Bruce Garrioch in the Ottawa Sun yesterday
Filed in: NHL Talk, NHL Business of Hockey | KK Hockey | Permalink
Tags: nhl+schedule,
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What a joke. Fix the schedule the right way, not this half-measure.
1. Home and home with the other conference. 30 games.
2. 3 games with teams in the same conference, but not in the division. 30 games.
3. 6 games with each team in the division. 24 games.
That increases the schedule to 84 games, but I can’t see that being a huge problem. More revenue for the owners and, therefore, more salaries for the palyers.
Posted by PRStoetzer on 11/20/07 at 02:03 AM ET