It's a fairly safe bet that this is a temporary measure, which Bettman will use as leverage to expand to 32 teams. I think we can expect Phoenix to move after this season, probably to Quebec. They'll go into the Snowbird Conference. One or two more teams will likely also move, and whichever cities are left without a team will get expansion franchises sometime down the road. (The theory that makes the most sense to me is that Bettman will use the additional expansion franchises as a sop to the NHLPA in the next round of CBA bargaining, as a tradeoff for giving the owners a greater percentage of revenues. Owners get more money, plus the expansion fees, players get more jobs.) The postseason format annoys me a bit, but it's not a huge problem for us. It is for Carolina, NYI, and NJ, but not our problem. The Wales and Campbell trophies are likely to be retired, unless they're given out to two of the four conference champions, with two more awards created for the other conferences. (Oh, and Gary? They're divisions. Calling them conferences doesn't fool anybody.) I guess the best way to look at the playoffs is that the first two rounds are essentially play-in rounds. Looking at it like that, only one team from each conference gets to play for the Stanley Cup, and you have to play within the conference to determine which team that will be. After that, the four conference champions play in the third round, and the last two standing meet for the Stanley Cup. It's likely, though not a given, that the conferences won't be aligned by geography, so that the third round of the playoffs will be seeded by record. If the Flyers (101 pts.), Lightning (95), Kings (98), and Red Wings (108) were the four conference champions, the Wings would play the Lightning, the Flyers would play the Kings, and if the Flyers and Lightning won their rounds, we'd play Tampa for the Cup. One very important thing for everyone to consider: Just because our conference seems to have a particular set of strong teams now, doesn't mean that will always be the case. If our incoming conference system existed in 2006-7, the "Eastern" conference standings would look like this: NJ - 107 PIT - 105 NYR - 94 NYI - 92 CAR - 88 WAS - 70 PHI - 56 BUF - 113 OTT - 105 TB - 93 TOR - 91 MTL - 90 FLA - 86 BOS - 76 Just five seasons ago, WAS, BOS, and the Flyers were atrocious, both OTT and NJ were ridiculously good, and both NYI and TOR would have been in the playoffs. Who's strong and who's weak can change at a moment's notice, so there's no reason complaining about competitive imbalance. You're likely to end up on the wrong side of the imbalance soon enough.