The playoffs are deliberately biased. The two eastern conferences get the best four out of seven, meaning they’’ve got a 57.1% chance of making the playoffs. The two western conferences get the best four out of eight, meaning they’ve got a 50% chance of making the playoffs. Over the long term, that is going to give an economic advantage to the 14 eastern teams.

You’ll end up playing the same 3-5 teams over and over again in the playoffs due to the 2 inter-divisional rounds. It may help to build rivalries, but it will also lead to lots of familiarity. We’ll have a bigger post on the realignment and what it means for Buffalo up in the morning.

It’s certainly good for the Sabres. The only eastern teams that it is not good for are the two Florida teams who just had their travel expenses greatly magnified by being deliberately placed with a group of teams that they are considerably distant from geographically. If the NHL wanted to do this geographically, as they claim to, they would have taken two Atlantic teams and moved them into the Northeast, not two Southeast teams.

However any playoff system that gives a certain group of teams a better chance of making the post season than another group of teams is biased and cannot stand. This playoff system is deliberately biased. It should not be allowed to stand because it gives an economic advantage to the 14 eastern teams. Let the top three teams in each conference get automatic bids with the remaining four teams be the ones with the best records, regardless of conference. The western teams have long claimed that the NHL is institutionally biased against them in media marketing and in other ways. This realignment format gives additional, and credible, support to that claim. The team owners and the NHLPA should shoot this down immediately.