Over expansion has wrecked all pro sports. It has diluted the product.
Baseball: Contract 3 teams
Basketball:4 teams
Hockey 4 teams
Football 2 teams
Over expansion has wrecked all pro sports. It has diluted the product.
Baseball: Contract 3 teams
Basketball:4 teams
Hockey 4 teams
Football 2 teams
Baseball? Try remove 12 teams! Eliminate inteleague play and playoffs. If 162 games is not enough to determine a league's rep to the World Series, how many are?
Basketball? No contraction, just raise the hoop two feet!
Hockey? Go back to about 16 teams, and go back to a forty game regular season with MAYBE four playoff teams.
Football? No more use of hands by o-linemen, offensive holding 15 yards. No two-tiered facemask running into the kicker penalty... automatic 15 yards. Modifications of most "judgement of intent calls" into "judgement of action" calls. Stick with the 32 teams for now.
I agree with your general approach, but I like the idea of a hockey league that has no more than 24 teams. There are really only eight solid hockey markets in North America these days, and by this I mean markets where a team can draw a lot of fans and pay competitive salaries even in marginal years. These include the Original Six franchises, plus Philadelphia and Edmonton. A "second tier" group of teams would include larger U.S. cities like St. Louis, the Twin Cities, and perhaps Los Angeles, along with smaller Canadian cities like Vancouver, Calgary, and Winnipeg.
Well, if you ask me the NHL should be restricted to only Americans and Canadians, and a separate pro hockey organization should be formed, called the "Russo-European Hockey League" for all the Russians and Europeans who play. After all, if you look at NHL rosters you'll see that most teams are two-thirds Czech or Russian, (also several Scandinavians, one third Canadian, and every now and then an American or two.