I did mention some good road draws but did go on to say all of the teams in the NHL. Who wouldn't want to see Columbus with the best goalie in the world right now, Stanley Cup favourite Tampa, ROY candidate Hischier or the Islanders? Canes are an exciting team, Sens are coming off a cup finals, and Philly fans are always fun to heckle. Florida with Barkov, and Luongo in the twilight of his career also games of interest.
Perhaps I am in the minority.
I don't think you're in the minority of die-hard hockey fans. I'm just saying that it isn't a good business decision for the NHL to be doing that with their inventory, because the die-hard fans like you are probably sticking with your season tickets like you did when only 9 of 15 Eastern Teams visited St. Louis.
The business decision needs to be made on what makes someone who goes to a game or two a year decide to go to four ore more. Or from zero to one game.
Let's say you get one visit from:
2017-18: PHI, TOR, TB, WAS, DET, NYI, CAR, FLA (but not the other half)
2018-19: NYR, MON, PIT, BOS, NJD, CBJ, BUF, OTT (but not the other half)
And replacing those games are one more at home against your division and two visitors from the Smythe (rotating through them until Quebec or Houston joins the league).
That's not going to upset you so much you cancel your tickets. When you're looking at your life schedule vs the Blues schedule, you're half as likely to say "Eh, I'll catch them next year" when it's "eh, I'll wait two years."
The reason it is a sound business decision is because when you look at attendance data over a 7 year span (which I did a while back), the Western Conference sees about 300 more tickets sold for Crosby & Ovechkin coming to town. And about 150 more tickets for NYR, MON, TOR, BOS, PHI, DET.
But they see 500 FEWER tickets sold when OTT, CAR, FLA, TB, CBJ, NJD, NYI, BUF visit.
That's "1500 more" in game games, and "4000 fewer" in eight games, for an average of 156 FEWER tickets sold per game than a team's average attendance overall.
Financially, that effect is worse for business when Western Conference teams come east. Aside from a Winnipeg Jets nostalgia bump their first few years, really the only Western Conference team that bumps up the gate significally has been Chicago. Edmonton this year probably will a bit.
Doesn't it make sense to consider "attendance optimization" when it comes to scheduling? The NHL product basically is nothing more than it's inventory. If they're not trying to maximize the value of that inventory, it's a bad business move.
Especially considering we have 10 or so markets that make people on this site irate over their collection of revenue sharing.