Kevin Dupont

Once more, the NHL is contemplating rearranging its deck chairs.  The 30-team league (the Original 30) figures two conferences are enough, but six divisions are too many.  

Have a calculator within reach?  Good.  Please calibrate it to not exceed the number 30.  

If the Lords of the Boards scratch their itch to reconfigure things, they'll end up with two conferences — East and West, same as now — and each conference will have one eight-team division and one seven-team division.  The days of three divisions, five teams each, would be gone.

Not sure about you, but I don't like the imbalance, or lack of symmetry, inherent in 8 and 7.  A seven-team division is just aching to be turned into a matching eight-team division, and if we learned anything in the NHL's ever-expanding '90s, it was that bigger is definitely not better.  

We don't need a 32-team NHL.  

In fact, we don't need a 30-team NHL. There just aren't enough NHL-caliber players to stock the existing NHL teams (no calculator necessary).

Size matters, and for the NHL, the product and potency would be far better with fewer teams — not more.  But contraction is pure fantasy.  In the New NHL, contraction would have to be bargained with the NHL Players' Association.  No union would ever willingly surrender jobs, not even in the form of roster cuts, never mind the elimination of a full team or two.  The PA surrendered to a salary cap after losing the 2004-'05 season in that fight, but it would never accept folding up a team and the resultant loss of 25 jobs or more.

Truth is — and this is the reason we always have to keep the expansion police on alert — there are a few towns around North America that would love to get an NHL franchise.

Kansas City tops the list at the moment.  There is a new building just aching for a tenant, courtesy of L.A. Kings billionaire owner Philip Anschutz, and city fathers want the Penguins to speedwaddle out to the heartland.  

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Mario Lemieux and friends told Anschutz/K.C. interests early in January that they don't want to leave Pittsburgh, but they also don't want to remain in their dingy, outdated Igloo, the oldest building in the NHL.  What they want most is to remain where they are, in a new building, with the same kind of sweetheart deal offered in Kansas City. Stay tuned. We should know soon after the All-Star break, on or about Feb. 1, how that will shake out.

But K.C. is not alone atop the we-want-an-NHL-team wish list.  

A prominent club owner earlier this season told me that he favored Houston as the next big thing, should the league decide to expand or if an existing club were looking to move.

Las Vegas ultimately will land its first major professional franchise. Like states that ultimately surrender to casino gambling, in order to prop up budgets and prevent more taxes, a pro sports franchise will sprout in the desert. Guaranteed. Will it be the NHL?  Everyone's knee-jerk reaction, for decades, has been to say no.  But look at what nearly happened in Pittsburgh.  Until late December, the Penguins had a deal in place, approved by the league, to have a casino build them a state-of-the-art arena in downtown Pittsburgh.

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However, the casino, Isle of Capri, shockingly did not win city approval for a slots license, and the proposed arena plans immediately fell off the table (enter the wooing of the Penguins by the Anschutz/K.C. combo).

Well, if the NHL were OK with a casino paying to build the Penguins an arena, then it's not much of a leap of faith to think the game with a sin bin could set up in Sin City, is it?  Once you've agreed to have a casino build an arena, and essentially become the team's landlord/partner, it really doesn't matter what the city is, or what the appearance is, or what people will say.

Another potential landing spot for the NHL, should it decide to expand, would be Somewhere-Up-There-in-the-Northwest, USA.  Maybe Seattle.  Possibly Portland.  Rumors of such a move have been around for 20 years.  That doesn't necessarily make those rumors moot, but now K.C. is ready to roll and the population has exploded in Las Vegas during those 20 years.  Seattle/Portland may have lost their franchise before they ever got it.

Then there's Canada, with roughly one-tenth as many people as the U.S. (300 million).  Despite the numbers imbalance, a half-dozen of the league's 30 teams already reside in Canada.  Hey, it's their game, or at least they say it is, and dreamers in Winnipeg and Quebec City — once proud NHL franchises — hope they'll hear "Game On" shouted again one day from their arena roof tops.  That's far more romance than realism.  San Antonio or Oklahoma City might get the nod ahead of those two NHL ghost towns.

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For the time being, pending the Penguin decision, the NHL's 30 teams remain in place.  No one on the league side has formally stated plans for expansion.  But with that rink ready in K.C., and others around North America eager for tenants, a reconfigured salary-capped NHL already has its list of potential buyers/suitors.  

Unfortunately, what the NHL doesn't have is the players.  Sure, parity can be a beautiful thing.  North America still cranks out enough homeboys to keep the NFL, and even the CFL, stocked with corn-fed linemen and ball luggers.

But now, some 20 years into having all of Europe's doors being swung open, even hockey's  worldwide talent pool isn't large enough for 30 NHL teams to stock the shelves.

Imagine the fun we wouldn't have if reconfiguration led to 32.

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