Clip the Wings, Prey on the Predators

For various reasons, I only saw the last six minutes or so of last night's tilt between the Vancouver Canucks and Nashville Predators. After Vancouver's rough-shod treatment of the Wings, I began to wonder -- and now I'm almost sure, that Nashville's and Detroit's great records are less about how great those two teams are and more about playing Chicago, St. Louis and Columbus a total of 24 times. It's easy to make 100 points in a season when you can garner (at least on paper) 48 of them from 24 games. I'll have to go back and look at how many points the Wings and Preds got inside their own division, but it's certainly starting to look suspicious.

Just another reason to loathe the post-lockout schedule. Never mind not being able to see all the other teams in your building at least once -- for one or two strong teams in a lopsided division, it renders an impressive end-of-season point total just a little bit hollow. Hey, Gary, it's never to soon to scrap this schedule in favour of something that'll make that point total really reflective of a team's strength relative, not just to teams in their own division, but in the whole league.

Better still, adopt a multiple-table system like that of soccer leagues in most countries. Now that would be interesting. Teams would stay at the highest levels because they deserved to be there, and for no other reason. But it'd be harder to sell TV rights for all the teams.

And that could pose a problem, since for some American teams (even strong ones like the Ducks), TV revenue may be all they can count on. Has anyone seen how empty Anaheim, L.A., Tampa Bay and Phoenix are on a regular basis? It's unreasonable to expect any hockey team to be successful in North America south of the 42nd parallel. The one or two that do (Dallas and San Jose) are aberrations. The rest of them, if they can't make it, should be actively shopped to Northern cities in the US, or even back up to Canada (welcome back, Winnipeg Jets; hello Québec Panthers) where they belong. In the absence of takers shut down to shrink the league back to a high quality 24 or so.