Interestingly, Winnipeg won’t see much difference in frequent flyer miles from switching conferences. “Believe it or not, the travel benefits to Winnipeg are minimal at best,” says Daly. When they played in the Eastern Conference, the Jets’ schedule was maximized so they’d play clusters of eastern-based teams on road trips, and those clusters are geographically closer than the Western Conference clubs they’ll now face.

Of course, there are still some slight geographic oddities to the NHL’s new alignment, such as the grouping of teams in the Atlantic Division (which includes Florida and Tampa Bay with clubs in the continent’s northeast) and the name of the Metropolitan Division.

Daly notes dividing the Eastern Conference teams was a challenge. “It doesn’t work perfectly north and south either, especially because of traditional rivalries. We tried to maintain the traditional rivalries in the northeast, the Ottawa-Montreal, the Montreal-Boston,” he says. “These are rivalries that have existed for a long time.”

The NHL decided grouping traditional adversaries along the best geographical lines possible was the ideal solution. Hence, Florida and Tampa Bay (natural rivals) ended up in a division with Boston, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Buffalo and Detroit (many of whom are long-standing foes themselves). “They’re all in the Atlantic region, and all in the Eastern Time Zone, and that’s why we went with Atlantic,” says Daly of the division moniker.

The other re-grouped division in the Eastern Conference is in the mid-Atlantic region and is, as Daly says “largely a metropolitan region,” hence the name.

“It was important for us to keep what we developed in our last realignment, where you’re basically keeping Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary in the same division, and you’re keeping Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto in the same division, so that they play a maximum number of games against each other,” says Daly. And, East or West, who wouldn’t mind a trip south to Florida or California every once in a while?