NHL Teams are Playing Too Many Out-of-Conference Games

"Wow, what an interesting matchup! Maybe these two teams will play each other in the Stanley Cup Final! Wouldn't that be cool?"

-Garry Galley, probably

You have no way of fact-checking this but I assure you, I'd be taking this same stance if the Ottawa Senators went 32-0-0 against Western Conference teams last year. I'm gonna get up on my soapbox and say it:as it stands there are far too many out-of-conference games in the NHL season. The 82-game season can sometimes feel like a slog, and it's made all the worse by allocating 32 of those games to matchups nobody really cares about.

It's pretty fun watching Brady and Matthew Tkachuk face off against each other – this used to be an out-of-conference matchup back when the latter was a Calgary Flame – but I only needed to see that particular game once per season, on television. And both of Ottawa's jerseys are dynamite, so there's no issue on that front.

I can only assume the rationale for two games between East and West teams is that this ensures that every NHL team visits each building at least once each season. And if you're, for example, a Flames or Edmonton Oilers fan living in Ottawa, it guarantees a game in which you'll be able to see them in person. Fair enough. That said, I'm sure both the Flames and Oilers' fanbases as a whole would prefer an extra two games against each other. Same with the Sens and Leafs, Habs and Bruins, Moritz Seider and Ben Chiarot, there's a lot of untapped potential here.

I could see the value in using Sidney Crosby to draw Western fans to games, and Connor McDavid doing the same for the East Coast. Counterpoint: these stars don't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. McDavid's the best player in the NHL, but he doesn't move the needle as much as, say, Tom Brady did for the Patriots, or Lebron James did for the Cavaliers. The NHL, for a number of reasons, just isn't driven by individual stars in the same way that you see in some other professional sports. Could you imagine the best players in the NFL or NBA going through nine years of competition without winning a single championship? That's why I don't think there's a need for any one player to be paraded around every NHL arena each season, in lieu of those sweet, sweet rivalry games.

Fewer out-of-conference games also make sense from a cost perspective. Teams will require fewer road trips and spend less time traveling. For example, you could have the Sens do the California trip every other year, alternating with their venture across Western Canada.

As for the increased number of divisional games, you can take a page out of the MLB and run a few regular-season series. If the Sens and Leafs play 6 times in a season, you could potentially run a 2-3 game series in both cities. The 2021 season went a tad overboard with this concept by necessity, but a three-game regular-season series between division rivals, with emotions carrying over between games, seems like an easy way to generate entertainment.

Playing against teams in the same conference, but in a different division, such as the Washington Capitals, having 2 of 3 games be a mini-series would also reap those same benefits, albeit on a lesser scale. "But I'll be out of town that weekend and I wanted to see my favorite tea"-yeah and I wanted the Double Dash mechanic to appear in every Mario Kart game but we don't always get what we want, do we?

If we cut the number of out-of-conference games in half, and re-allocate them to divisional matchups, we end up with the following setup:

• 1 game against 16 Western Conference teams
• 3 games against 8 Metropolitan Division teams
• 6 games against 7 Atlantic Division teams

Would you look at that, we end up with a total of 82 games! Despite there being a few legitimate merits to keeping the schedule as is, the NHL stands to gain a lot of viewership at a lower cost by transitioning away from an over-reliance on variety, and simply giving the people what they want: more rivalry games!