AHL 2011-12 DIVISION ALIGNMENT

http://theahl.com/alignment-playoff-format-set-for-2011-12-p171563

I have not seen anything here on this, but when I saw the article in the Peoria Journal Star, I got curious.

Does the alignment of having a division with four or five southern teams and one western Canada team make sense?

Does putting Charlotte (NC) in a division with four or five teams nearest the Great Lakes make sense (especially since NC is closer to teams in the northeast)??

Just curious if anyone has any insight and can explain the logic/lack of logic in play here.

 

Release the crickets!!! ;D

You have three outlier teams (Norfolk, Charlotte and Abbotsford). Nothing you can do about Abbotsford, they're where they make the most sense.

If it were up to me I would have placed Charlotte in the same division with Norfolk, moved Syracuse to the division with Toronto/Rochester/Hamilton and shifted Grand Rapids in with Chicago/Rockford, etc.

And I spent all of about 30 seconds looking at it.

 

Not knowing a ton about the AHL, but knowing some stuff about geography, I don't think there's much they could do there. Other than Abbotsford, the league's footprint stops at San Antonio. They're an oddity, kind of like the Texas Rangers in baseball or Dallas Cowboys or St. Louis Rams in football. Yeah, you can put them in another division that might make slightly more sense, but there's no obvious geographic fix for it.

And the Charlotte and Norfolk teams? Similar deal. If you try to shoehorn them into one of the other divisions you're displacing a team that fits better. The other Midwest Division teams are tightly grouped. Charlotte and Norfolk would go together well in another division, but when you have 19 teams in a 30-team league located (roughly) east of the Appalachians and north of the Mason-Dixon Line, what are you supposed to do?

 

The Cowboys and Rams aren't oddities our outliers so much as they are misaligned teams, in the NFL's case, because of a preference to keep historic rivalries over more sensible travel. There are plenty of nearby teams that simply aren't in their divisions (the Texans, Titans, Chiefs, Bears, Lions, etc.). The Rangers are a better example since baseball is also odd in that you have the different rules in the different leagues, so you can't really consider the Astros as a neighbor. But neither league bases its divisions strictly on geography like the AHL, NHL or NBA.

The best comparison might be the Stars or the Minnesota Wild, which are also misaligned but are much more significant outliers in terms of geography to any other team in the league, let alone the division. The Stars get the worst of it without another team within two time zones of them for much of the season, but they've been a victim of their own geography as much as anything else. It will be very, very interesting to see how the NHL redraws the lines next summer.

 

Hockey alignment has been fucked since 1967, when the NHL added six new teams, including Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and grouped them all together in the "West Division."

Didn't help matters when they added Vancouver in 1970 and put them in the East Division, then stuck Atlanta in the West Division two years later.

 

It's hard to beat the old Norris Division of the mid 70s which had Montreal, LA, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Washington. What, did they just pull teams out of a hat?

 

Good call, RC, I remember that!!

Sort of along the same lines - the original Adams Division, with Boston, Buffalo, Toronto.....and California?

 

I love the logo bars in that AHL article. I wonder if I could get them to send them to me for use.

 

I'm not even sure why the NHL had divisions in the mid-70s. Played a fully-balanced schedule and seeded the playoffs 1-16.

 

Well, the AHL certainly doesn't play a balanced schedule. Some of these teams don't meet in the regular season, and I can tell you that Hershey and Wilkes-Barre/Scranton seem to square off every other weekend.