> In basketball, the conferences typically play 15-18 games out of about  
> 30 allowing for much more interconference play and some nationally  
> exciting games on prime tv like UCLA-Duke, etc, etc.  In hockey these  
> premier matchup in mid and late season would be great for the game and  
> get it national exposure.... just my 2 cents (or maybe 4 cents  
> allowing for rising gas prices).

The problem is -- using your basketball example -- for each of those
nationally exciting games on prime time tv you get about 10 crappy
games.

Most of those games are not in mid-to-late season -- they are early in
the season. 

In addition to that, basketball gets a handful of exhibition games
before the non-conference mostly crappy games, before the "real season"
begins. And then they have a league tournament, which may or may not
matter for NCAA tournament seedings (but brings in lots of money). And
then they have an NCAA tournament that seems to last forever (and also
brings in a lot of money).

All the other problems with the scheduling restrictions have been hashed
out before. Some of the conferences have already given up a balanced
schedule.

I think the only way to get significantly more inter-league
games would be for a complete realignment of all the conferences into
smaller units, so that the conferences could have their complete league
season and still have room for more inter-league play. I doubt there
will be a significant increase in the number of games in the season.

Ignoring the fact that such drastic conference realingment is unlikely: 

I've poked around with some numbers. None of them work particularly
well, unless an odd number of teams per conference is acceptable as a
norm, not an exception.

Consider this: 8 conferences, 6 with 7 teams, 2 with 8 teams. The 7-team
conferences play each team 4 times -- that is 24 conference
games/team. The 8-team conferences play each team 4 times -- that is 28
conferences games/team. Which leaves (from a max of 34 games/team) 258
inter-league games to be scheduled. Of course, after adopting this plan,
and realigning all the leagues, we will discover that there is a
fundamental flaw in the fairness to the two leagues with only 6
inter-league games per team instead of 10. Or the other way around. 

Or, more likely, we will find that the way the inter-league games are
scheduled is not fair to some teams/leagues. And that is hard to fix
becuase it has to do with money, philosophy of the coaches, and
money. 

You can play with the numbers all you want, but there is no perfect
solution. I am not even sure that there is a better solution.

	  --david