#NHL Central Division

[suburbanbonfire]

Another year, here we go!

(prints here)

some wip shots since I know some people like seeing them!

meant to take more screenshots, but ended up super busy and forgot once I came back after a few months, whoops. Making the iceberg itself was super fun!

[gaytkachuk]

"tumblr's favorite NHL team" bracket: central division

pacific | metro | atlantic

[captainlexapro]

this may be a dumb question 😣 but i want to get an answer directly from ppl who have been into hockey for way longer (and i’m not finding a helpful and straightforward list anywhere)

does *every* nhl team have a nickname/shorthand? (À la buds for the leafs, pens for the penguins, etc etc)

Or do the teams that already have a one syllable name NOT bc it’s already short? (like the stars, jets, etc etc)

Are any of them something that one likely wouldn’t guess? (Like the habs)

[uniteddallashockeybyte]

23/24 Central Division Champs.

Credit to Dallas Stars Twitter

[nhlsite]

[Blackhawks] Brett Seney signed to a 1-year, 2-way extension ($775k cap hit)

rawchili.com

[dedalvs]

NBA Realignment Proposal

This is Tumblr—a place where you can be who and what you wish to be. Today I take advantage of that to bring to you an idea that I think will solve a couple of dire problems the National Basketball Association (an American professional sporting association for basketball) has been struggling with in recent years. The problems are two-fold:

(1) Division championships are meaningless. In the old days if you won your division, you earned a top seed. When there were two division, the division winner with the best record got the 1 seed, and the other division winner the 2. It didn't matter if there was a second (or even third) place team that had a better record: winning your division meant you earned a top seed. A good example is the 1991-92 season, where the Chicago Bulls (67-15) earned the top seed, but the 51-31 Boston Celtics earned the second seed as winners of the Atlantic Division, despite the fact that the Cleveland Cavaliers had a much better record at 57-25. Winning the division was incredibly important. Now teams are seeded by record throughout the conference. Division titles mean nothing.

(2) Super teams. Since divisions are meaningless but winning chamiponships is still the most important thing in the NBA, successful players go to teams that can pay the most money. The ones that have the most money are the teams that are most successful. With only two conferences, this usually results in two teams—one in the east, one in the west—being stacked. Players can either join that team or try to form another super team to rival them. And the ones that can rival them are other historically successful teams. All in all, it's a lack of parity, and the same teams winning every single time.

Now, it is assumed, amongst fans and sportswriters, that the league will eventually expand to Seattle, regaining their former Supersonics, and Las Vegas—the latter perhaps when LeBron James retires (he's expressed interest in being an owner for a team in Las Vegas in future). If that comes to pass (and no other teams change locations), I propose a radical realignment of the divisions, and concomitant playoff changes. These changes were inspired by the changes the NHL made in recent years. They had six divisions, like the NBA has now, but then when they expanded, went backward, to four divisions, and the results have been impressive.

If you need to refresh yourselves of the current alignment, you can do so here. Now here's the realignment I propose:

These are the four divisions the NBA had before expanding to six. Most of the membership is the same, but I'll note the discrepancies. First, the most easterly western conference team, the Memphis Grizzlies, has been moved to the east (I always found it absurd that a team in a state one state away from the Atlantic Ocean was in the western conference). The Toronto Raptors and Charlotte Hornets have been swapped, which makes geographic sense, and the Atlanta Hawks have been returned to the Central.

This gives us four divisions with eight teams each. Currently, ten teams from each conference go to the playoffs—kind of. Four teams in each conference are forced into a mini-tournament called the play-in. For this play-in, the 7th place team hosts the 8th place team and the 9th place team hosts the 10th place team in a one game playoff. The winner of the first game becomes the real 7th seed. The loser of the first game plays the winner of the second. The winner of that game becomes the real 8th seed. Then the playoffs proceed as they always have. Very strange.

I propose something radically different. Same number of playoff teams—even the same number of play-in teams—but it's all done inside the division:

Each division has its own playoff. The 4th and 5th place teams play each other for the right to take on the top place team in the division in the first round of the divisional series. Then the 2nd place team hosts the 3rd place team in the division. The winners of each series face off, the winner being crowned the ultimate division champion. Then the western and eastern conference division champions face off, resulting in conference champions, who face off in the finals. The bracket looks like this:

This means that one team from every division will always make it to the semifinals. Division championships are suddenly very important, and there's incentive for good players to try their luck on teams in different divisions if they can't make it in the division they're in. It takes two very large pools (the conferences) and separates them into four smaller pools. It will also ensure you get some nice, exciting playoff matchups in the early going, because every matchup is all but guaranteed to be a rivalry, as the matchups are always interdivision matchups.

For the curious, if this had happened for last season, it would've looked like this (less the two expansion teams):

Same exact playoff teams! And the first matchups would've looked like this:

Some of the matchups are the same, but we get some good ones earlier. Mavs-Pelicans would've been a lot spicier than Thunder-Pelicans. In general, we've got a lot better shot at getting better matchups earlier on, and good matchups at each stage. This is the NBA I want to see!

Thank you for coming to the Dothraki guy's Tumblr account.

[trohmann]

Patrick Stump and Pete Wentz announcing the fan voted central division NHL all stars!

[kevinskorchinski]

Everything you need to know so far about the NHL all-star weekend ↴

[article: NHL All-Star, this is just a summary]

📍Scotiabank Arena, Toronto, CANADA

🗓️ February 1-3

FAN VOTE IS BACK: you will get to vote for 12 players, 8 skaters and 4 goalies. You can submit a ballout 10 times.

FEBRUARY 1: PLAYERS DRAFT

A player (the captain) will be paired with a celebrity. They will pick 11 players (9 skaters and 2 goalies)

Entertainment

Man of the Year will be announced

PWHL (Professional Women's Hockey League) will have a 3-on-3 (more information below)

FEBRUARY 2: SKILLS COMPETITION

12 Players will compete in 8 events. The player with most points takes home $1 million (USD) (or $1,329,136 in CAD). Each player will compete in 4 of 6 events. THE EVENTS:

Fastest Skater

Hardest Shot

Stick-Handling

One-Timers

Passing

Accuracy Shot

Top 8 point-earners will advance to the 7th event: the SHOOTOUT-> each player will choose a goalie to shoot against.

The top six point-earners will advance to the 8th and final round: the OBSTACLE COURSE-> points doubled.

FEBRUARY 3: ALL-STAR GAME

3-on-3 tournament between 4 teams, winning team receives $1 million (USD)

There has already been a player chosen from each team (here are the players): [Name, team, position]

Frank Vatrano, ANA, F

Clayton Keller, ARI, F

David Pastrnak, BOS, F

Rasmus Dahlin, Buff, D

Elias Lindholm, CGY, F

Sebastian Aho, CAR, F

Connor Bedard, CHI, F (injured)

Nathan Mackinnon, COL, F

Boone Jenner, CBJ, F

Jake Oettinger, DAL, G

Alex DeBrincet, DET, F

Connor McDavid, EDM, F

Sam Reinhart, FLA, F

Cam Talbot, LAK, G

Kirill Kaprizov, MIN, F

Nick Suzuki, MTL, F

Filip Forsberg, NSH, F

Jack Hughes, NJD, F

Mathew Barzel, NYI, F

Igor Shesterkin, NYR, G

Brady Tkachuk, OTT, F

Travis Konecny, PHI, F

Sidney Crosby, PIT, F

Tomas Hertl, SJS, F

Oliver Bjorkstrand, SEA, F

Robert Thomas, STL, F

Nikita Kucherov, TBL, F

Auston Matthews, TOR, F

Quinn Hughes, VAN, D

Jack Eichel, VGK, F (injured)

Tom Wilson, WSH, F

Connor Hellebuyck, WPG, G

Vincent Trochek (New York Rangers) and Kyle Connor (Winnipeg Jets), to replace Connor Bedard (Chicago Blackhawks) and Jack Eichel (Vegas Golden Knights).

FEBRUARY 1st ENTERTAINMENT

PWHL 3-on-3 showcase

There will be 2 teams 12 players on each, 10 skaters and 2 goalies.

Team King (Cassie Campbell-Pascall): named after Billie Jean King

Team Kloss (Meghan Duggan): named after Ilana Kloss

MASCOT SHOWDOWN

Thursday 1st, 6:00-7:00 p.m: Dodgeball

Friday 2nd, 5:00-6:00 p.m: Skills Competition

Saturday 3rd, 12:00-1:00 p.m: Street Hockey Game 

Sunday 4th, 1:00-2:00 p.m: Musical Chairs

2:00 PM: Championship Trophy and "Most Valuable Mascot" Belt Presentations

THE FAN VOTE RESULTS: [name, team, position, votes]

Thatcher Demko, VAN, G: 1,398,699

William Nylander, TOR, F: 1,393,578

Cale Makar, COL, D: 1,065,367

Elias Pettersson, VAN, F: 976,716

Leon Draisaitl, EDM, F: 967,975

Mitchell Marner, TOR, F: 946,154

J.T. Miller, VAN, F: 839,215

Morgan Rielly, TOR, D: 830,480

Brock Boeser, VAN, F: 762,378

Sergei Bobrovsky, FLA, G: 712,100

Alexandar Georgiev, COL, G: 584,071

Jeremy Swayman, Boston Bruins, G: 578,739

10 players have been selected and you can vote for 2 more skaters:

Auston Matthews

William Nylander

Nathan MacKinnon

Cale Makar

Connor McDavid

Leon Draisaitl

Nikita Kucherov

Jack Hughes

David Pastranak

Elias Pettersson

Quinn Hughes and J.T. Miller were voted in to participate in the All-Star skills competition.

NHL All Star Jerseys:

🔴Pacific Division

🔵Atlantic Division

⚪Metropolitan Division

🟡Central Division

THE CAPTAINS HAVE BEEN ANNOUNCED!

Team Matthews: Auston Matthews, Justin Bieber. Assistant Captains: Morgan Rielly.

Team McDavid: Connor McDavid, Will Arnett. Assistant Captain: Leon Draisaitl.

Team Mackinnon: Nathan MacKinnon, Tate McRae. Assistant Captain: Cale Makar.

Team Hughes: Quinn & Jack Hughes, Michael Bublé.

[starry-hughes]

nhl zodiac sign distribution

(out of 780 players currently listed on rosters from all 32 teams)

check out all the data for each division and team below!

metro division

atlantic division

central division

pacific division

this took me a while yesterday and i only did it because i was home from work sick. the dates for zodiac seasons were from a usa today article and all rosters were pulled from nhl.com and were from feb 5, 2024 (these rosters included injured/out players). all the math was done by google sheets after i inputted all the data.

[marner2tavares]

Game Time! As the season starts, I want to figure out the most important thing of the season.... how is the hottest team in the NHL??? So I'll post these to make the bracket to see who is the hottest team in the NHL

please reblog for a larger sample size!

Cast Your Vote for who you think is the Hottest NHL team in the Central Division

[blusical]

NHL teams as Littlest Pet Shop - Pacific Division.

Ducks

Flames

Oilers

Kings

Sharks

Kraken

Canucks

Golden Knights

Atlantic - Metro - Central - Pacific [You are here]

[39oa]

nhl x f1 fandom survey results

hello there! about two months ago, @andreisvechnikov and i posted a form meant to gather data from fans on tumblr of both f1 and the nhl so we could take a look at demographics, trends, and then subsequently share interesting corresponding insights.

in total, our form received n = 102 responses — honestly not that great of a sample size for stratifying data by teams when considering that there are 32 nhl teams and 10 f1 teams, so a lot of findings come with a large caveat, but hopefully this post will be interesting to you anyway! (of note is also that all of this data was collected before the nhl regular season began, so hopefully we can rerun this experiment sometime next year when the seasons are running concurrently and see how results have changed then.)

unrelated to our survey, @sergeifyodorov also polled hockey fans on their favorite teams a while back; his results will be referenced as well throughout this post! he was extremely kind and generous enough to send over his data so that we could play around with it on our own, so thank you again for that!!! one last time, please note that our results are not easily comparable because of different sample sizes and team/blog reach (for example: the leafs were heavily underrepresented in our data, but i'm pretty sure it's because the form simply never made its way to that corner of hockeyblr and not because leafs fans are statistically less likely to enjoy f1 LOL...)

without further ado:

DEMOGRAPHICS

"Where do you currently live?" + "How old are you?"

out of 102 participants, an overwhelming amount — 85.3% — live in north/central america or europe, and most respondents were also between the ages of 18-25. since the nhl is based in north america and f1 teams are (mostly) based in europe, i was curious to see how fandom trends varied across these two demographics specifically.

EUROPE VS. AMERICA

"Do you consider yourself more of an F1 or hockey fan?"

interestingly enough, 2 in 3 of the european respondents said that they like or follow hockey more, with only 15.15% preferring f1. asian and north/central american fans were a little more evenly split, with 38.9% north/central american fans saying they liked f1 and hockey about the same. however, altogether 89.2% of global respondents said that they prefer hockey OR that they like both sports about the same, so it seems that fans in our survey skew more toward hockey in general.

"Do you follow any top-division hockey leagues outside of North America?"

again, since f1 is primarily based in europe and since europe boasts a huge hockey market outside of the nhl, this question was aimed at understanding interest in other top-division hockey leagues outside of north america. more specifically — not anything like the ahl or ncaa but instead leagues like the shl and liiga.

the majority of the respondents who said they followed top-division hockey outside of north america were, unsurprisingly, based in europe, with over half (54.5%) claiming to follow other leagues and 1 in 4 (24.2%) preferring these to north american hockey.

as for north/central american respondents, a large majority — 85.2% — claimed to not follow any leagues outside of north america. here were the leagues mentioned at least twice:

"Do you follow professional leagues for any of these following sports?"

for this question, we gave several multiple-option choices of obvious sports and also allowed respondents to submit their own answers if we missed any. here were the most-commonly followed professional sports outside of f1 and the nhl, filtered to at least 2 responses:

interestingly, football and baseball were on par at 26.5% — or about 1 in 4 — each, although the most common response was actually none; 37.3% of respondents said they only watch hockey and motorsports for professional sports. the sports that received one vote each were: volleyball, tour de france, swimming, pro wrestling, gymnastics, figure skating, cycling, climbing, and australian rules football.

TEAM POPULARITY

NHL STATS

"What is your favorite NHL team?" + "If you like multiple NHL teams, feel free to name any others below." (<;- capped at 3)

in order to rank each team — despite different voting methodology and sample sizes from both surveys — i normalized a popularity score based on a weighted value, composed of how many people voted for it as their favorite team and then how many people mentioned it in the "other teams i like" question. each team was then graded relative to the top team, in our case dallas and in cody's case pittsburgh.

in the table below, the numbers in purple correspond to our survey and the numbers in grey show cody's results as reference. as you can see, toronto is very underrepresented in our data, while dallas is considerably more popular and tops the chart. 3rd-place vancouver was also our most commonly mentioned "other" team with 19 votes, despite only being 6 people's favorite team.

does this mean that fans of both f1 and hockey are statistically more likely to enjoy dallas than your average hockey fan? or does it just mean that i'm primarily a dallas stars blog and this was the audience i accidentally reached when sharing my survey? (most likely the second) the world may never know!!!

another way of looking at the popularity differences across both surveys is with a little scatter plot. same data, just different presentation!

F1 STATS

"What is your favorite F1 team?" + "If you like multiple F1 teams, feel free to name any others below."

not much that needs to be explained here — mercedes and ferrari were far and away the favorites, but red bull and mclaren were also fairly popular! the least popular team of all was haas, with only one person mentioning it as a team they liked and no one voting for it as their favorite team.

interestingly enough, 1 in 3 (34) of respondents said that they had no favorite team at all, with this response scoring higher than any single team (mercedes only had 21 "favorite" votes, although it had 36 total responses). this was a large contrast to the nhl results, where only 6 people answered none for their favorite hockey team — meaning that 94.11% of respondents claimed a favorite nhl team!

(perhaps this means that f1 fans are less likely to be loyal to a team and instead prefer to follow drivers' individual careers, or that team allegiances are simply stronger in hockey fandom. or maybe not! who knows.)

something else i was curious to see concerning the most popular teams was another location distribution, although this time i didn't want to simply calculate percentages straight-up since we already know that the global distribution skews mainly toward north/central america and europe. because of this, i filtered only teams that had n >= 10 votes and calculated the difference for each percentage from the global average, so i could see which teams were more biased toward a location than "expected."

for f1: ferrari, mclaren, and red bull all had slightly higher american interest than average, with red bull especially skewing lower on the european side.

for hockey: dallas had higher than average interest in oceania, with pittsburgh scoring higher in asia and seattle being especially strong in north/central america (and thus less so in europe). toronto, carolina, and florida also had higher support in europe.

(note again that these are very small sample numbers, especially for teams with less than 20 votes!)

+ just for fun, here's how the top 4 other sports (football, baseball, american football, and basketball) skewed location-wise.

probably not much of a surprise here, although interestingly europeans were more likely than americans to say they only followed motorsport and hockey.

PLAYER / DRIVER POPULARITY

"Who are your favorite NHL players?" + "Who are your favorite F1 drivers?"

when it came to calculating the most popular players, we asked that survey respondents list up to three of their favorite players, then assigned 3 points to the first player, 2 to the second, and 1 to the third. using this weighted count, i ranked drivers and players using a normalized score.

86 unique nhl players were mentioned for this question. out of them, 84.9% (73) are still actively playing in the nhl. the most popular active players were sidney crosby and quinn hughes, while the most popular inactive player was paul kariya, with 2 mentions and a score of 11.76%.

using the same process, 39 unique f1 drivers were mentioned for this question, this time with 95% (19/20) of the current grid being represented — the only driver not mentioned a single time was nico hülkenberg. the remaining 20 drivers were either retired or reserve drivers. lewis hamilton was far and away the most popular driver in this survey, while the most popular inactive driver was 3rd-placed sebastian vettel with a relative score of 61.18%.

here are the top 25 for each sport alongside their corresponding teams:

as you can see, the most-represented team in the nhl top-25 is dallas, with 4 players (robertson, hintz, heiskanen, oettinger) making the cut! other teams to have at least 2 athletes in the top 10 are edmonton for the nhl and alphatauri for f1.

F1 X NHL CROSSOVER

this was the main reason we created this survey in the first place. our burning question was: Which F1 teams do fans of certain NHL teams tend to like — and vice versa?

in order to calculate this, i mapped all the nhl teams each respondent voted for to all the f1 teams they voted for, assigning 1 point to each. so if someone had a favorite team and named three "other" liked teams for each sport, that would be 8 points on the matrix altogether. i then filtered out any nhl team that had less than 20 total tallies for f1 teams and created the chart below:

i also removed "none" votes since i was more interested in the distribution of interest strictly across f1 teams. finally, i filtered out the f1 teams with negligible amounts of votes and created another percentage chart relative to the global average (since we "expect" mercedes and ferrari to be most popular overall):

some summarizing thoughts:

DAL and VAN fans were both less interested in red bull and ferrari and more interested in mclaren and williams

NJD and PHI both voted less for mercedes; the former preferred ferrari and the latter red bull

CAR didn't have huge discrepancies across the board, but skewed a bit toward red bull and williams

COL had the lowest relative interest in mclaren of all teams, while SEA had the highest relative interest in williams

again, these sample sizes were pretty small so maybe it means nothing at all. i'd love to run this survey again with more responses and maybe also restrict the team choices to only 1 favorite + 1 other team per sport in order to really drill down into people's preferences, but hopefully this is interesting anyway!

FANDOM ORIGINS

i always love learning about how people got into a fandom, so we also asked respondents how they got into f1 and hockey, with the following options being provided:

Grew up around it/Family

Hockey or F1 RPF

Introduced by friends (online or IRL)

Discovered individually through fandom content (gifs, YouTube, podcasts, etc.)

Hockey books & romances (Hockey)

Drive to Survive (F1)

Other films, documentaries, etc.

3 respondents clarified that they specifically discovered hockey through reading the webcomic check, please!, but i decided to implicitly include this in the "hockey books" category. a few of the "other" options for hockey also specifically mentioned the olympics.

here was the distribution of responses, noting that the question was multi-option so there is overlap:

i also made a side-by-side bar chart to note differences between f1 and hockey origins. in this case, i paired "hockey books/romances" with "drive to survive," since i see them as the two biggest respective examples of mainstream media movements for each fandom (around social media/rps spaces i should say), the former being mainly based in booktok.

as you can see here, a considerable amount of fans got into f1 through dts (1 in 5). in terms of fanfiction, hockey rpf was a lot more influential in getting people into hockey than f1 rpf was in getting people into f1 (23.7% vs. 11.3%). lastly, hockey was also slightly more common as a childhood/family sport than f1, although only by a few percentage points — 28.9% of fans grew up with hockey and 23.2% grew up with f1.

of course, i couldn't end this question without doing another location analysis, which gave some interesting results:

for f1, the overwhelming majority of european respondents said that they grew up around f1 or were introduced to it by family — 51.5%, or over half (the chart says 44.7% because of multi-option overlap). in contrast, only 24.1% — or 1 in 4 — of north/central americans said this. their results were much more evenly split in general, with drive to survive and fandom content ranking considerably higher.

for hockey, the distribution actually looked quite similar between north/central americans and europeans, although americans ranked a little higher in terms of growing up around the sport. it's pretty much the same though — the main difference is that a good chunk of the "other" votes for the europeans specified getting into hockey through the olympics. altogether, respondents from asia, oceania, and south america mostly discovered hockey through a mixture of rpf and hockey books, although these are very small sample sizes so not fully reflective of overall experiences.

OTHER MOTORSPORTS

"What other motorsports do you follow?"

we were also interested in knowing what other kinds of motorsport people liked.

interestingly, north/central americans had the smallest proportion of f1-exclusive respondents, with 37.7% saying f1 is the only motorsport they follow. here were the series that received at least 10 votes:

indycar was by far the most popular "other" motorsport series, with motogp, nascar, and general feeder formulae (f2, f3, etc.) faring well too. unsurprisingly, you can also tell at a glance that there is overwhelming american interest in indycar and nascar compared to other series!

CONCLUSION

that's about all we've got at the moment. if there's anything else you'd like to see more of, or anything you're confused about/think doesn't make sense, feel free to reply to this post or shoot me an ask :') thank you again for reading and i hope you enjoyed this little post!!! 🥲❤️

[gaytkachuk]

"tumblr's favorite NHL team" bracket: metro division

pacific | central | atlantic

[slowwshoww]

Most Hateable NHL Team

feel free to campaign for the team you think is the most hateable. the best propaganda will be included in the next round

round one

[backbonemadeofglass]

NHL Team Moodboards (3/4) - Central Division

[cowboybarzy]

Hey! I hope you have been well. I wanted to ask you, since it is my first time following the nhl and NYI... how do playoffs work? is it like if you lose the game then you are already out? I am so confused.

welcome!! it’s stressful but I hope you enjoy this wild ride lol

so super basic explanation: each team in the playoffs gets paired with another team in their division and play a best out of seven games round. the winner of that round moves onto the second round and does the best out of seven games again against another team. the loser of that round is obviously eliminated from the playoffs. the western conference plays each other for a chance at the cup & the east plays each other for a chance at the cup.

western conference: (c) central division plays the (p) pacific division for a chance at the cup

eastern conference: (a) atlantic division plays the (m) metro division for a chance at the cup

wc: wild card spot (1 team from each division)

so, as of right now isles vs canes is currently 0:1

games 1 & 2 are played in one location (CAR), then games 3 & 4 are played in the other teams location (NY), then they switch locations back and forth depending on how many more games need to be played.