[kovazub94]

I also used to also think that contraction would be the way to go to have more than just incremental impact on the quality of the NHL product to compete against the other big 3 sports in NA. But is it really the case? Let's look at the forwards. We are definitely not talking about superstar quality since among all these contraction teams in your list there maybe 3 star quality forwards to reassign among the remaining 24 clubs. Depth? Well, excluding forth line quality forwards, let's say 4 per team for obvious reasons, there a total of 8*6 = 48 remaining players which means that on average remaining teams would be replacing two thirds of their forth lines with their current 3rd lines. Improvement in quality? Definitely, but it is a marginal improvement for sure. And this is based on the six team contraction, with less teams to eliminate there would less quality to spread among more teams.