Dietz: Send NHL to the penalty box for this ridiculous restart plan

The NHL has lost its mind.

That's my 2 cents on the league's "trial balloon" of a plan that was unveiled by Commissioner Gary Bettman Wednesday.

The league's restart scenario revolves around bringing the 31 teams to two, three or four central locations, playing out the regular season and then conducting the Stanley Cup playoffs.

"No decision has been made," Bettman told SportsNet. "And I said as we were getting some feedback, 'We don't live in a world of perfect anymore. We're going to have to make adjustments.'

"Ideally, from our standpoint - and it would resolve a lot of issues - would be if we could complete the regular season, even if it's on a centralized basis, and then go into the (playoffs) the way we normally play them.

"That would be ideal. But that's, again, one of the numerous models we're looking at, and if we can't do ideal - if we can't do perfect - we're going to have to figure out what's next to perfect."

This sounds far from perfect, however.

First of all, why finish the regular season? Do you really want to make players from Detroit (17-49-5), Ottawa (25-34-12), San Jose (29-36-5) and Los Angeles (29-35-6) get back into shape just so everyone can finish with 76, 78 or 82 games?

It's ridiculous.

Even if you do that, how do you make sure all of the teams are in the right spots? The Blackhawks' remaining games were against Ottawa, Washington, Minnesota (twice), Buffalo, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Dallas, the Kings, Montreal, the Islanders and Rangers.

I can't even imagine how they make that work.

"Clearly, we can play into the summer," Bettman said. "Clearly, we can play next season, which we intend to do in its entirety, starting later. And so, with a lot of timing options, we have a great deal of flexibility, and we're not going to rush anything.

"We're not going to do anything that's crazy. We're going to try and do something, under the circumstances at the time, that is sensible."

Sorry, this hardly seems sensible.

What seems sensible is to actually reduce the playoff field to maybe 10 teams, gathering them in one location. The top three in each conference are in; the 4 and 5 seeds play a best-of-three series to advance. That's Flyers vs. Penguins in the East; and Stars vs. Oilers in the West.

And go from there.

Is it perfect? Of course not.

But at least it's not complete lunacy.