"Understand this: The road to the Stanley Cup, let alone to the playoffs, will become exponentially more difficult for the Rangers, Islanders and Devils to travel upon inception next season of the NHL's four-conference radical realignment plan that was overwhelmingly passed Monday night by the Board of Governors.

Everything is cyclical in sports, that's true — one only has to consider how dramatically the once-mighty Devils have fallen over the past few seasons to support that axiom — but it doesn't take a seer to see the degree of difficulty that will confront our three local teams beginning in 2012-13.

There will be fratricide in the as-yet-unnamed conference in which the Rangers, Islanders, Devils, Flyers, Penguins, Capitals and Hurricanes will compete for four playoff spots and then further compete in the first two rounds of the tournament in a return to the postseason format that essentially existed from 1981-1993."