Dreaming Up a Different Realignment Scenario It's February, the time in a long N.H.L. season when the players have to battle to stay sharp and focused to try to help their teams make the playoffs. The last thing they want to do is worry about the realignment situation and work on their own proposal to counter the N.H.L."s initial bid. So I felt that it would be a good time to make my own realignment scenario based on some of my thoughts as well as what N.H.L. players around the league have made clear are their priorities. Let's start with the biggest obstacle - making sure each team has an equal shot at making the playoffs. The N.H.L. offered up a four-conference scenario that would have two conferences with seven teams and the other two with eight, and this led to the biggest complaint from the players" side. "Personally, I'd like to have the same shot at making the playoffs as everybody else," Flames wing Alex Tanguay told reporters at the time. If you're in one of those conferences that has eight teams, it's definitely going to be much tougher than seven teams to make the playoffs. I don't know how they can make that work. I'm sure there's a solution. To combat that proposal, instead of four conferences, why not just keep them as divisions and split them into two conferences of 15 teams. You would have a division of eight teams and seven in both conferences. Then, much like it is in the league right now, you would have the 15 teams in each conference battle for the eight playoff spots. The two division winners would get the first two spots, and then the rest filter behind in order of most points. This part of the plan would allow every team to have an equal shot at making the playoffs. A positive side to the league's proposal was the idea of having each team play one another twice in a season. This was to ensure that fans in each city would have the opportunity to watch all the great players in the league. The players seem to be on board with this idea. "That was something that everyone was excited about, that was the biggest positive," Adam Burish, the players" representative for the Dallas Stars, told reporters. I think eventually the N.H.L. has to get there, I think they will get there, but I think that was the biggest point that everybody loved about the whole thing. Now we come to the fun part, the issue of travel. It has probably been the most talked-about subject in the entire realignment project. The players have wanted to see a template of a schedule to compare it with how things are now. They were not given one, and that was a big reason why they turned down the agreement. In my proposal, the idea was to make the travel as equal as possible throughout the league. The objective was to try and make the gap in travel between the East Coast and West Coast teams shrink. With 15 teams in each conference, you have them split into division's of eight teams and seven respectively. For the divisions of seven teams, it is simple math: they would play each team in the division six times for a total of 36 games. They would then play the remaining 23 teams in the league twice, totaling 46 games. That adds up to a total of 82 games, simple right? For the divisions with eight teams, it is a little more complicated but not much. With only 22 teams outside your division, your nondivision games would shrink to 44 games, leaving 38 games within the division. Seven division opponents would be played five times each for 35 of your division games. The remaining three games to total 82 would be randomly split throughout the division. This template would create a sense of fairness in many ways. The first is that the schedule would be as balanced as it has ever been. Each team plays the rest of the teams in the league twice, and then you have only a two-game separation in terms of divisional games between the larger and smaller divisions. The other way of making this a fairer N.H.L. is for travel reasons. Anyone that has followed the N.H.L. knows that the travel in the Western Conference has been much worse than in the East over the years - and in some ways that can never change. The geography won't allow it. But by proposing a schedule that has each team facing one another twice a year closes the gap. Every Eastern Conference team will have to make that long trip out west at least twice, much like the West Coast teams going east. This schedule should also benefit the entire league with almost half of each team's games played in their respective divisions. With teams having either 36 or 38 divisional games each, it gives every team 18 or 19 of their road games closer to home in divisional play. Conference layout proposed by league: Devils, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Rangers, Islanders, Washington and Carolina Boston, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Buffalo, Florida and Tampa Bay Detroit, Columbus, Nashville, St. Louis, Chicago, Minnesota, Dallas and Winnipeg Los Angeles, Anaheim, Phoenix, San Jose, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Colorado The league did a pretty good job in terms of splitting the teams into respective conferences, what I will call divisions. However, the one team that I would move to one of the Eastern divisions is Columbus. The way the league laid out the teams, you would have 16 teams in the West and 14 in the East. Columbus would seem to make the most sense, they are the farthest east in terms of location and they have not built up any rivalries in that division that would be missed. The other team that would have made sense would have been the Detroit Red Wings. They were one of the teams spearheading the realignment talks. But it would be hard to break up the great rivalries with teams like the Chicago Blackhawks and the St. Louis Blues, matchups that you want to see five or six times a year. I would also argue that Detroit would have a worse travel schedule playing in the East. Although all the teams they would be playing in the West are all in the central time zone, they are easily the closest teams in terms of distance from Detroit. So with that said, Columbus moves to the East with the Pittsburgh, New York, Philadelphia division and you have 4 divisions, 2 conferences and 15 teams in each conference. It is by no means a perfect system, but it could be a template that could work for the players, the league and, most importantly, the fans. Paul Caponigri played Division I hockey at Ohio State before playing minor league hockey for five seasons. He is now a color analyst for WOSU radio, the Big Ten Network and Turner Sports. He blogs regularly about hockey at Cappy's blog. Follow him on Twitter.