Scheduling from Oblivion

Time to throw in my two cents on the NHL schedule announced yesterday. There’s been quite the outburst of whining over Tampa Bay opening its Stanley Cup defense against Carolina, as well as other teams having to play lots of games against Carolina, and on and on. We might as well go back to 1997-98 on ESPN, when you could hear the tears behind the sarcasm whenever they had to mention the Canes (er, “former Hartford Whalers”). Maybe the loudest arena in NHL history (per CBC’s Don Cherry) should just implode. And what would have happened if the puck had bounced the other way on Brett Hull, with 90 seconds left in Game 3 of the 2002 Stanley Cup Finals? That horrible team — that stain on the NHL’s existence — might have (gasp) won the hallowed, precious Cup. (Let’s pause for a second here… I’m sure that thought sent some sensitive readers straight to the floor.)

(Yes, I’m a little angry at the moment. Why do you ask?)

But back to rational analysis. I like the emphasis on divisional rivalries, but the problem is that divisional rivalries mean nothing in the playoff race, where everything’s per-conference. I also like the interconference scheduling, similar to baseball’s interleague play — each division plays one cross-conference division at home, one on the road, and skips the other entirely. (For example, the Canes play one game at each Pacific Division team, host one game each against the Central teams, and skip the Northwest this year.)

On a purely personal note, the Canes are playing at home the one Friday night I’m almost certain to be able to go to Carolina, and I may be able to make every game they play at Washington. Good times.

A way to fix the divisional meaninglessness problem would be to revert to the old-style four-division setup with divisional playoffs, and such an idea has been proposed, according to the Chicago Tribune. So, without further ado, the BTN.org NHL Realignment.

• Should the St. Louis Blues move to anywhere non-traditional within reason (e.g. Kansas City or Oklahoma City), a mini-realignment would move them to the Adams Division (for a regional rivalry with Dallas) and the Washington Capitals to the Patrick Division. Happy, Caps fans?

Teams I tried to keep together: the existing Eastern and Western Canadian blocks; the old Norris Division (substituting the Wild for the North Stars), the California teams plus Phoenix, the Florida clubs, NY/NJ, PIT/PHL. Everything else was geared toward regionality. Unfortunately, Buffalo and Toronto couldn’t go together, and I wasn’t able to keep Washington out of the ex-Southeast barring a St. Louis move.

Mid-July Roundup

At this point, I think we can conclusively say that getting engaged and buying regular tickets for a major league baseball team is bad news for a blog. Tough luck, but the blog’s just going to have to deal — or, as I said in a comment on this site a few months ago, “Priorities, m’boy, priorities.”

But let’s do a quick tour, just to see what interesting stuff has gone on while I laid down on the job.

• Several of my co-workers are native Chinese speakers, and their cube-to-cube chatter exhibits a fascinating linguistic phenomenon called code switching. A conversation that starts in Chinese might shift into English for a sentence or two, then (apparently) seamlessly back and forth again several times in the span of 90 seconds.
  I could tell more if I understood Chinese, but even with my complete lack of knowledge in that arena, it seems to me that work-related segments — and not just technical terms, but talk about work hours, time off etc. — come out in English, while parts that I would expect to be personal (just by contextual positioning, tone of voice etc.) are usually in Chinese. It’s quite interesting to listen to as an amateur linguist.
• Bret is on a roll these days (though it’s said so for a while on the hot dog cart). He’s blogging up a storm during his last summer of freedom before he joins the Metro-riding masses. Pay him a visit, read the comments, and check out his Flickr photostream as well.
• Amy has also been in high gear recently, despite (or perhaps because of) her pregnancy and move from Paris to Arizona by way of the East Coast. I’m still weighing my bets for the baby birth stats pool.
• A few weeks ago, Eric at Off Wing and Ryan at Distinguished Senators took note of the Nats’ high no-show rate — people buy tickets and then fail to show up for the game. I’ve contributed to this problem several times myself, and I suspect the size and inflexibility of the Nats’ ticket packages are the main causes. Almost all MLB teams offer fixed packages down to as few as 7 or 8 games, while this season the Nats only offered one set of 41 games or two different sets of 20 games. In addition, several other teams offer “make-your-own” packages — essentially bulk tickets, where you could buy ten at a particular price level and use them any way you like, whether it be ten seats at one game or a single seat for ten games. The Nats offered nothing of the sort. Hopefully, this can be attributed to the rushed nature of the move from Montreal, rather than a deliberate attempt to force buy-up; if so, next year should offer more options (and I’ll be more likely to purchase a package again). My fondest wish? Trade-in, where if I knew in advance that I’d miss a game, I could trade my tickets in for equal value on a game I could attend. With lower-deck patrons taking advantage as well as upper-deck customers like me, the Nats would then have the opportunity to resell expensive seats to walk-up fans, who right now must buy seats at my level or cheaper due to the full-season lower-deck sellout. Win-win, right?
• While I still don’t drink coffee or any of its derivatives, I’ll second Monday’s D103.com endorsement of the Starbucks Mint Mocha Chip Frappucino by adding a BTN endorsement of its coffeeless counterpart, the Mint Chocolate Chip creme-based Frappucino. Like Daryl, I have trouble with Starbucks’ pretentious sizing scheme. But now that I rattle off a fourteen-syllable drink order (at 29 cents per syllable!) without blinking, it seems that emphasizing “medium” over “grande” crosses the line between principled and passive-aggressive.
• Karl Rove / Valerie Plame / Joe Wilson: yawn. Lileks is right on this one — even I can’t make myself care, and I both follow politics and work inside the Beltway.

I’d promise more content soon, but you wouldn’t believe it if I did. So you’ll have to be satisfied that photos from Lake J and Baltimore are coming… sometime. Hopefully “sometime” will be before next month, when Cleveland/Cedar Point, Roanoke and western Maryland will join the photo queue in successive weekends.