As a Red Wings fan, I find the recent scheduling of back-to-back road games a bit, ahem, troubling.They play on the road and in cases where they have "back-to-back" games, scheduled for two nights in a row, they finish up with a difficult game in the Pacific Time Zone (Sharks, Ducks). This means that the Red Wings will play a grueling 10:30pm game without much rest. It occurred to me that the converse works out better for the West Coast teams - they play earlier, relative to their own time, but not so early (like NFL teams) that they'd still be bleary eyed.

So in short, the advantage goes to the teams that live on the West Coast when travelling, and a distinct disadvantage goes to those teams that live in the Eastern time zone... mostly due to the nature of the night time games and the sometimes grueling scheduling that takes place.

So what to do about it? Not much to do about it... I'd love to see west coast games start earlier, but it's just not practical due to TV deals and such. At least it's something we can think about when our favorite "East Coast" team goes west and still manages to win. It would be interesting to see the stats, too, but I'm too lazy to do much besides spout off here, heh heh.

Go Wings!