Quote (dxlightning @ Apr 21 2016 01:23pm)
Owners would never go for it nor would the fans. As much as LA vs NYR might be interesting, you'd have half the games televised at 4pm in LA and half the games at 10pm in NYR. Bad travel and certainly bad for viewership. Gives a competitive advantage to teams that barely traveled. And really CHI-STL and DET-TBL are the only matchups that aren't a top 8 vs bottom 8 team. They'd theoretically have to face each other anyway if they're actually a better team than the rest of the league.
This being the biggest issue of the 1v16, 2v15, 3v14..... style bracket.
The other being the difficulty of developing rivalries. Take DETvsTBL this season. Last season it was a tame series, now this year they have a history and don't like eachother. What would happen if they played Round 1 again next year.
As much as I find issues with the 1A 2A 3A 1M 2M 3M WC1 WC2 style, it isn't much worse than the old 1v8 conference setup