Hockey should drastically alter schedule

Welcome to the NHL's dog days.

It's that period of the season when weary teams, far from both the playoff stretch run and the excitement of a new season, slog through one boring contest after another.

In these dark days of winter, teams are banged up and emotionally drained. It's a combination that produces substandard games during the one part of the year when hockey is most in the spotlight -- competing only against basketball.

One of the more intriguing ideas floated around during the NHL All-Star game was the idea of limiting or eliminating conference play. This idea could simultaneously help to remedy both the injury and the emotion problems the NHL has to deal with.

The first thing people need to realize is that travel really is detrimental to a team's play. Finely tuned athlete or not, a player is not going to be at his best after a four-hour flight, which sees the player get into his hotel room at 3:00 a.m. on the day of a 7:00 p.m. game.

Think of it... A game ends 10:30 p.m. on the west coast. Then, the team grabs an 11:15 p.m. charter from LA to head back East. The flight takes four and a half hours, and when you add in the time difference, the players aren't making it into bed until sometime around 7:30 a.m.

Now repeat this over and over again, sometimes shorter flights, and sometimes the time change works in a players favor, but the debilitating effects of living out of a suitcase add up.

Changing the schedule to cut down or eliminate inter-conference play won't eliminate these situations, but it will ease the countless travel complaints.

More importantly though, in this age of expansion, it will give fans and players a chance to develop new rivalries, or to re-establish older rivalries.

Think your local team could never develop a good hate for say Tampa Bay or Nashville? Think again.

Did Detroit and the Colorado/Quebec City franchise have a history until Kris Draper got smeared into the boards by Claude Lemieux in the playoffs? Now those games, no matter when, are must-sees.

Toronto and the New York Islanders hadn't played a really meaningful set of games since before the Isles reeled off their four straight Stanley Cups.

But, after the conventional warfare that masqueraded as a first round series last year, the first Isles-Leafs game was covered to the hilt by the media in both cities. There was a definite sense of anticipation.

Simply put, familiarity breeds contempt. More simply put, contempt makes for exciting intense hockey games. Contempt also provokes the odd circus incident, but the old saw about nobody booing a fight remains true.

I don't encourage pointless thuggery, but many consider a well-played game with a spirited bout to be the epitome of the NHL experience.

So what should the NHL do? The simplest solution (and I believe the best) would be the following:

Have each team play six games against their divisional opponents. With five teams a division, each team would have played 24 games. The complaint is obvious -- five games means an unequal split of home and away. This is true, but the NHL rectifies this by simply flipping who gets the three home games each year. Overall it adds up to 25 home and 25 away so that's not a problem.

Have each team play five games against the remaining ten conference foes. This provides an additional 50 games, giving a total of 74.

Have each team play four sets of a home and home series with a non-conference opponent. This would allow old enemies such as Detroit and Toronto to hook up twice a year, as well as bringing marquee teams like the New York Rangers and Colorado into areas that could use the boost (Atlanta, Florida, Anaheim).

This system would also allow the six Canadian teams to continue to play. As a Canadian this competition is important, both for the identity of the game and the health of the Canadian markets (A Montreal-Oilers tilt being easier to sell then, say, Edmonton-Buffalo).

From a marketing perspective the league would do well to play all of these "cross-over" series close together -- like Baseball does.

I'd say after the All-Star game would be a good time. The NHL could kick marketing into high gear by featuring a Colorado-Rangers match-up followed by say, Los Angeles-Philadelphia.

By playing the home and homes close together, it also helps to build up the rivalry in those match-ups. Versus, say, having a barnburner of a game in early November and then having to wait three months for the rematch. This also allows for a brief break from the familiar opponents, setting the stage for a final set of games leading into the playoffs -- making every game down the stretch a "four-pointer."

The NHL could make these four opponents permanent, or could rotate them. While this does bring an element of an unbalanced schedule, the schedule as it sits now, is not perfectly balanced. Besides things change, a group of four teams that now look like a death-march might become a cake-walk in three seasons time.

There was a time when the trip to Alberta was known as "Death Valley" because the Calgary Flames and the Oilers were arguably the top two teams in the NHL.

While the idea might offend purists, the benefits of both reducing the grueling NHL travel schedule and ramping up the emotional level of the games makes this idea worth serious consideration.