America’s major professional team sports leagues have had a long period of stability since the early part of this century, with three leagues sitting at 30 teams while the NFL went forward with 32, but that may be changing. The NHL has already increased the size of its league to 32, and by most accounts the NBA and MLB may follow suit by the end of this decade.
When it comes to organizing leagues into conferences and divisions, 32, as a power of 2, is close to an ideal number; not for nothing did baseball have two eight-team leagues for decades prior to the advent of expansion in 1961. It gives the flexibility to create either four divisions of eight teams each, as in the NHL, or eight of four, as in the NFL – with the latter being more interesting and allowing more schedule flexibility and a greater emphasis on rivalries.
On Sunday Nate Silver gave his ideal divisional alignment for a 32-team MLB, opting to go with eight divisions of four teams. This is a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while myself, and I need to get a post out by the end of the month while buying myself some time to work on more substantial posts I mostly spent this month putting off, so I decided to piggyback off of his proposal to present my own visions for how to divide 32-team leagues not only in MLB, but in the NBA and even NHL as well.
NHL: This really demonstrates how academic these discussions can be. Other than the NFL, the NHL would seem to be the best league to divide into eight divisions of four teams:
| Western Conference | Eastern Conference |
|---|---|
Northwest Division
Pacific Division
Central Division
Southwest Division
|
Northeast Division
Metropolitan Division
Midwest Division
Southeast Division
|
But the NHL didn’t go this route and it doesn’t take very long looking at this chart to see why. Just look at the Northeast Division: three Original Six teams in one four-team division. There’d be a bitter fight over the fourth spot and a lot of complaining among the other Eastern Conference teams over not being able to play the most popular teams as much as they’d like. The Midwest certainly has popular teams of its own in the Red Wings and Penguins, and regularly playing the Rangers should help make up for the lack of other valuable teams in the Metro, but once Ovechkin retires the Southeast is going to be lacking in glamour teams. Yet there’s no way the league would want to break up the Habs’ rivalries with the Leafs and Bruins. The awkwardness of the situation can be reflected in the actual divisional alignment of the Eastern Conference, where the teams in the Atlantic are mostly the more northerly ones – the three Canadian teams plus the Red Wings, Sabres, and Bruins – but then it leapfrogs all the way down to the Lightning and Panthers, who don’t get to play their closest natural rival in the Hurricanes but do get to play valuable Original Six teams, while the Hurricanes and other teams in the Metro get to play the Penguins and Rangers. (Contrast with the West, where the top two divisions I list form the Pacific and the bottom two form the Central.)
This divisional alignment makes a lot more geographic sense than what the NHL actually has, but the asymmetry in the popularity of the league’s teams means those considerations need to give way to more practical matters. Arguably, the NFL was only able to adopt its eight-division format because its raw popularity means that it doesn’t much matter what teams everyone plays. That’s a point that resonates particularly strongly in baseball.
MLB: Silver places a lot of emphasis on “geographic coherence” that leads him to cause more teams to swap leagues, despite his own stated reticence to do so, than is strictly necessary, with Houston’s return to the National League not being among them. I share Silver’s stated desire to keep (or make again) the leagues relatively distinct, and increasing the total number of teams to a multiple of 4 means the leagues can be evenly divided without holding an interleague series every goddamn day, allowing interleague games to remain special. But part of that, in my view, is that teams in geographic proximity or otherwise forming natural geographic rivalries should be in opposite leagues. The Astros moved to the AL in 2013 largely because they were sold at that time, so MLB could strongarm them into moving from the NL Central and its regular games against the Cubs and Cardinals to the relatively lower-wattage AL West, and because, with the NL Central having six teams at the time to the AL West’s four, it was the easiest way to even out the divisions without too many other moving parts, but it resulted in both Texas teams in the same division, let alone the same league, which had heretofore been avoided. What should have happened was that the Rockies or D-Backs should have moved to the AL West and the Astros took their place in the NL West. Yet Silver compounds that error by putting both Missouri teams in the NL, with the Florida teams doing the same in the AL.
We don’t need to do all that. Just put the Astros back in the NL and replace them with the Rockies or D-Backs – Silver goes with the D-Backs, which wouldn’t be my preference (I’d prefer to have the two teams representing the two Spring Training sites in opposite leagues), but having Colorado as a geographic outlier in the NL West balances Seattle serving the same role in the AL. We’ll go ahead and follow Silver’s other assumptions – the return of the Expos, a second expansion team in Nashville or Charlotte, the Rays somehow managing to stay in the Tampa area despite their stadium misadventures and cockamamie split hosting schemes (or at worst moving to whichever city doesn’t get an expansion team) – and see the result:
| American League | National League |
|---|---|
AL West
AL North
AL South
AL East
|
NL West
NL North
NL South
NL East
|
With minimal league moves, the result is quite elegant: not only does nearly every team have a natural geographic rival, they’re all in their counterpart division, except for the Royals in the South opposite the Cardinals in the North, and the Reds in the South opposite the Guardians in the North. There’s some fudging of regions involved, but not as much as exists in the NFL, and Kansas City and Cincinnati are arguably culturally Southern enough to justify it.
But baseball, like the NHL, has an asymmetry in the most popular teams, with a handful of megapopular teams at the top and everyone else hoping for the extra ticket revenue from one of those attractions coming to town. The circumstances behind the Astros’ move shows how that leads to some divisions being vastly more desirable to be in than others. So what’s more likely to happen is baseball using the NHL’s solution and going to four divisions of eight teams:
| American League | National League |
|---|---|
AL West
AL East
|
NL West
NL East
|
This still wouldn’t be ideal, if only because the AL West is still lacking in valuable teams, but the other three divisions should have a decent rotation of valuable teams regularly visiting the other teams in the division, while preserving geographic rivalries. You could play 12 games against each of the other teams in the division (84 games), 6 games against each of the teams in the other division in your league (48 games), and have 30 games left over for interleague play or simply adding more in-league or in-division games.
NBA: While MLB hasn’t even really thought too hard about where it wants to expand, preferring to settle existing stadium situations first, there’s a pretty firm consensus that when (not if) the NBA expands it’ll be to Seattle and Las Vegas. When we plug those teams into the existing league, though, we find that we can’t break them down into divisions at all. What do you do with the Pacific Northwest teams in Seattle and Portland? Do you break up the California teams by putting them in a division with the Northern California teams? Do you instead put them in a division with Utah and Denver? But then do the Texas teams end up needing to be broken up? A four-division format would work moderately well for the Western Conference, but would be decidedly iffy in the East:
| Western Conference | Eastern Conference |
|---|---|
Pacific Division
Southwest Division
|
Central Division
Atlantic Division
|
The West breaks down decently neatly, but the teams in the Midwest get split between different divisions, resulting in a bifurcated Central with four teams in the Midwest and four teams in the Southeast – and that’s a relatively best-case scenario that avoids an NHL-like clusterbleep resulting from the Hornets and Hawks being placed in the Atlantic.
On the other hand, over the past couple decades divisions in the NBA have become decidedly unimportant anyway to the point you could be forgiven for going the entire season without knowing which teams are in which divisions. Standings for following the playoff race have spanned all teams in each conference for quite some time now. Perhaps expansion would be the trigger for the NBA to take the next step and get rid of divisions entirely – especially with the In-Season Tournament scrambling scheduling and making it somewhat unpredictable at times.
In their place, each team could have a protected geographic rival, which would be a quite natural choice in most cases; each pair of teams within each division in the list above would form a rivalry, so the top two teams in the Pacific would form a rivalry, then the next two, and so on. If you have four games against your rival, three games against each of the other 14 teams in your conference, and two games against the 16 teams in the other conference, that’s 78 games, leaving four more in-conference opponents to play a full four games against. Two of them would be the teams you draw in the IST quarterfinals and semifinals, or the equivalent games being played while those are going on, while the other two could be teams in your IST group (having too many teams outside the group that you’re already slated to play four games against would restrict scheduling for the knockout stage). We could, however, have just one team in each group be assigned a full four games, and leave the other for a designated non-geographic rival, allowing each team to regularly play teams their fans might be interested in for non-geographic reasons. These rivalries could be:
- West: Spurs-Nuggets, Jazz-Pelicans, Grizzlies-Suns, Las Vegas-Kings, Warriors-Lakers, Clippers-Blazers, Sonics-Thunder, Mavericks-Rockets
- East: Pacers-Nets, Knicks-Celtics, 76ers-Bucks, Timberwolves-Raptors, Wizards-Hornets, Hawks-Magic, Heat-Cavaliers, Bulls-Pistons
- Alternate East: Pacers-Nets, Knicks-Heat, Magic-Hawks, Hornets-Cavaliers, Pistons-Celtics, 76ers-Wizards, Raptors-Timberwolves, Bucks-Bulls
This would create rivalries between the four ABA teams, allow Seattle and New Orleans to root against the teams that moved out of town, create more geographic cohesion that better approaches the effect of adding divisions by adding additional geographic rivalries for selected teams (including giving the Mavericks an in-state rival), regularly activate rivalries created through multiple playoff matchups, and more.
As much as I don’t buy the notion of MLS as a fifth major league, I did consider covering them in this post, but decided against it as they seem content to stand pat after expanding to 30 teams next year, they’ve largely avoided divisions since the 2000s, and if they did decide to expand to 32 it’s not entirely clear what cities would even be in the running.