I remember seeing talk about how it creates an unfair advantage for teams in strong divisions and whatnot and I wanted to take a journey down the road to see what the affect would be. I have put together a table of what the extrapolated standings would be based on this years winning percentages. Also, I should probably say that I'm a huge fan of this realignment and the excitement it would bring, so I'm using this data to support that argument. Feel free to point out the trends you see that would be negative, though.

This first table is a table of the schedule for our new conference. The last row is the the number of games a team has against all the teams in the new conference. For out of conference games it should be 16 and for interconference games it should be 38 (for our Conference) The bottom row is total games for each team in the Conference. Obviously, this should be 82.

After generating a schedule, I then had to figure out what the win percentages were for each team in the Conference. After I got that, I extrapolated that number to the new schedule. I'm going to post on table per team, but you should get the idea.

This is where some guess work came in. In all cases I tried to carry over OTL's, but there were some cases where for example a team would be 4-0-1 against a team this year but only play them twice in the new schedule. I think in most of those cases i made them be 2-0-0 against the team. Also, for WPG was a special case. Since they are in the east they've pretty much only played one game against their new conference mates. They've shown to be a strong home team,s o I tried to take that into account in most cases. As an example Dallas is 0-1-0 against them this year which would put them at 0-5-0, which i feel is unrealistic so I changed it to 1-3-1 and WPG to 3-1-1. This last point also demonstrates one other assumption I've made. If a team in a head to head matchup has an OTL the corresponding team also has an OTL in it. So if there is a 4-2-1 head to head, the corresponding head to head is 2-4-1. I know this isn't super realistic but it seems to be statistically sound.

So given, that here are the charts for the individual teams...

Team = The Team of Record

Versus = Who the Played

W = Wins this year

L = Losses this year

OTL = Overtime Losses this year

W% = Win Percentage This year

GA = Games Against in the new schedule

New W = Wins in the new schedule

New L = Losses in the new schedule

New OTL = Overtime Losses in the new schedule

SUM = SUM of New W, New L and New OTL

EVAL = YES if SUM = GA and NO if SUM doesn't equal GA.

(I used the last two columns for checking and error correction)

Alright, so where does that leave us? With an overall record of:

With a Final Standings of:

As you can see, the fight for the last playoff spot would be very close with the remaining 8 games most likely directly affecting the standings in 4 point swings every night. I also noticed the precipitous dropoff in points at the bottom of the conference so i wanted to look at points earned out of conference.

If you remove the conference games the standing look drastically different, demonstrating exactly how important the conference games are: