What NHL realignment could hypothetically look like for the Rangers — and rest of League
What NHL realignment could hypothetically look like for the Rangers — and rest of League
The Major League Baseball community is buzzing with talks of realignment. Commissioner Rob Manfred recently proposed the idea of shaking up the league’s structure if MLB adds an expansion team sometime in the near future.
Imagine the New York Yankees and New York Mets squaring off as permanent divisions rivals, or the Dodgers and Giants being split apart — a change that would feel just as shocking to hockey fans, as say, breaking up the New York Rangers and New York Islanders.
So let’s play the same game with hockey. We’re deep into the NHL offseason, and the League’s current four-division format isn’t bad, though maybe outdated. When the realignment was introduced in 2013, the Vegas Golden Knights and Seattle Kraken didn’t exist, and the Phoenix Coyotes (changed to Arizona Coyotes in 2014) hadn’t relocated to Utah. With multiple expansion teams since and shifting geography, it’s fair to ask what would a new, rivalry-driven realignment of the NHL look like today?
Few divisions in sports could match the intensity of this one. The Hudson Divison brings together three of hockey’s most heated metropolitan rivals — Rangers, Islanders, New Jersey Devils — and adds in the Original Six Boston Bruins. Every team in this divisions has history and hostility against one another. Rangers-Islanders and Rangers-Devils remains two of the NHL’s hottest rivalries, and Bruins-Rangers is as classic as it gets.
