NHL Realignment: Are Boston Bruins' Rivalries With Flyers, Rangers Doomed?

From an entertainment standpoint, the Boston Bruins’ losses outscore the gains by at least a soccer-like margin with the NHL’s new alignment and scheduling format slated to go into effect next season.

Every Northeast Division matchup is left unaffected with still six yearly encounters with Buffalo, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. One minor change for the better has the Bruins exchanging annual visits with every team from the artist still known as the Western Conference, simply meaning the addition of one more guaranteed meeting with the more distant adversaries.

But for that, along with two more clashes with Florida and Tampa Bay, there is an unsavory price to be paid. You also have the Bruins relinquishing half of their current allotment of meetings with Carolina, New Jersey, both New York franchises, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Washington.

No matter what approach the NHL was going to take, somewhere on the map, something good needed to be sacrificed. But that doesn’t make those sacrifices any easier to brook.

For the Bruins, their fanbase and those with a special concern for revenue and ratings, the primal sacrifice here is the loss of two yearly meetings with the Rangers and Flyers. With only one venture apiece down to Broadway and Broad Street and only one visit to Boston from those two teams, this will mean the shortest Bruins-Flyers and Bruins-Rangers season series in league history.

That simply isn’t right. These are three of America’s oldest, tradition-laden cities and three of the NHL’s oldest, tradition-laden franchises. To shrivel their crossing of paths this extensively is a borderline sacrilege, for much of their tradition is interlocked by way of the rivalry.

There is a reason why those rivalries have held up nicely despite the fact that the Bruins have long resided in the Northeast Division while New York and Philadelphia are in the Atlantic. That has held true for more than a decade, in which time the NHL has been a rigid, 30-team circuit cut smoothly into six, five-team divisions.

Sure, intra-divisional matchups have received due priority, first with a slight overkill of eight annual meetings and then six starting in 2008-09. But having conference cohabitants from different divisions meet twice apiece at each other’s venues has been critical to fostering and preserving additional rivalries.

But starting next year, the Bruins and Rangers will see each other as regularly as the Patriots and Jets, even though they always have about five times as many games on their itinerary as their NFL neighbors.

Is that any way to treat an Original Six matchup featuring Boston and New York, the two cities that practically make Hartford the Berlin of major sports fandom? Does it make any sense for America’s oldest existing NHL franchise to face the country’s second-oldest living franchise as frequently as Columbus and Minnesota, the league’s two greenest additives?

But while Bruins-Rangers is the geographic equivalent of Red Sox-Yankees and while Bruins-Canadiens is similar in the sense of all-time one-sidedness, then Bruins-Flyers is akin to Sox-Yanks in that it’s a battle of bullies.

In other words, the Yankees and Red Sox are both generally scorned by their peers as financial tyrants, but Boston buffs always see the Pinstripes as a contemptible cut above their own team. Just the same, the Bruins and Flyers both subsist heavily on physicality, often on the borderline, but it usually looks like Philadelphia is sporting the extra blotch of blood and dirt.

Flyers fans might not see it that way, but that is part of what makes the rivalry work.

Unfortunately, cutting the Bruins-Flyers season series in half could ultimately diminish everything. The repercussions might take time to take effect, especially depending on how many holdovers stay with each team for how long.

But even with a fan’s or promoter’s best effort, it will simply be a tough fight to keep stoking the flames of hatred when the Calgary Flames become as familiar as the Flyers.

There is, as always, a potential plus point to this unfortunate development. Many have pointed to the new alignment and playoff format potentially allowing for the likes of the Bruins, or any other member of “Conference C,” to encounter the Rangers, the Flyers or another “Conference D” team in the Stanley Cup finals.

You could take that as akin to the Red Sox facing the Mets in the World Series or the Pats tangling with the Eagles or Giants in the Super Bowl, all of which has happened in the last 25 years. Or you could take it as absurd, much like, say, the idea of Alabama facing LSU in the NCAA football championship.

Over time, the former sentiment might become more likely than the latter. But remember that the last time the Bruins faced New York or Philadelphia in the first half of the 1970s, the NHL had only two-fifths as many teams as it does now.

The odds of two long-existing east coast teams approaching the final frontier today are comparatively unfavorable. And under the tentative playoff policy that would have the first two rounds restricted to matchups within one’s own conference, there is also less chance of any playoff meetings altogether.

The NHL’s expressed logic behind its realignment is to create more rivalries, but how many teams in one seven- or eight-member conference can be sufficiently competitive at one time? For that reason, it must be stressed that an impassioned Bruins fan cannot live out on Habs and Sabres alone.