More realignment figures

Just wanted to post some figures that are related to the discussion going on over at Tom Tango's blog about realignment.  I'd encourage you to read the discussion there first.  (I encourage you to read the rest of his blog regularly also.)

NHL Realignment

I recently finished a paper on realignment with friend and colleague Bill Pulleyblank.  The purpose of the project was to determine solutions to realignment that minimize travel for the league. We also compare our best solutions to the NHL 4-conference proposal from around a year ago. 

I also wrote a couple of articles about it on Hockey Prospectus.  Links to everything, plus some animations that are discussed in the second Hockey Prospectus article, can be found on the Realignment page.

Realignment Animations

I'll be writing some articles on realignment shortly.  In the mean time, here's a preview... I posted some animations related to this project on the Realignment page, including the top 100 solutions for each of the 4 major sports leagues.

Details about our method of generating and ranking these realignments is coming soon...