How the NHL playoff format works: divisions, wild cards, tiebreakers
Sixteen of the NHL's 32 teams make the Stanley Cup Playoffs. That sounds simple until you look at the standings in March and see a team with more points sitting outside a playoff spot, or a division sending five teams while its neighbor sends three. The format is built around divisions first and conferences second. Here is how it fits together.
Who gets in
Each conference has two divisions and sends eight teams. The top three teams in each division qualify automatically. That accounts for 12 of the 16 spots.
The last four spots are wild cards, two per conference. They go to the two teams with the best regular-season records among the rest of the conference, regardless of division. So if one division is much stronger than the other, it can send five teams while the other sends three. A fourth-place team in a strong division can make it while a fourth-place team in a weak one stays home, and that is by design.
How the bracket is set
The NHL uses a fixed bracket. There is no reseeding after each round.
- The division winner with the better record in each conference plays the wild-card team with the worse record.
- The other division winner plays the better wild card.
- The second- and third-place teams in each division play each other, in the half of the bracket headed by their own division winner.
The winners inside each half meet in the second round, which decides the four conference finalists. Most of the first two rounds are division rivals playing each other, and that is a big part of why early-round hockey gets so heated. The same teams have already met several times that season.
Every round is best-of-seven. Win four games and you move on. Home ice in the first two rounds goes to the team that finished higher in the standings. In the conference finals and the Stanley Cup Final it goes to the team with the better regular-season record, whatever division it came from.
How ties are broken
Teams are ranked by points. When two or more teams are tied, the NHL's order is:
- Fewer games played, which means the better points percentage.
- More regulation wins (wins in 60 minutes, not counting overtime or shootouts). This is the RW column in the standings.
- More wins excluding shootout wins, the ROW column.
- More total wins.
- More points in games between the tied teams. If they played an odd number of times, the first game in the city that hosted the extra game is dropped. With three or more teams tied, it's the percentage of available points in games among them.
- Better goal differential for the whole season, counting overtime goals and one goal for each shootout win.
- More goals scored, counted the same way.
The first tiebreaker mostly matters during the season, when teams have played different numbers of games. By the last day everyone has played the same schedule, so the real first tiebreaker in April is regulation wins. That is why winning in 60 minutes matters. A shootout win earns the same points in the standings as a regulation win, but it does nothing for the tiebreaker that comes up first.
The 2026-27 calendar
This is the first 84-game NHL season since 1993-94, up from 82. The regular season opened September 29 and ends Saturday, April 10, 2027, with all 32 teams playing. The league has not published dates for the 2027 playoffs or the Stanley Cup Final yet. Usually the first round starts within a few days of the final regular-season game, and the Final runs into June. I will update this post when the dates are out.
What we've seen so far
It's November, so nobody is clinching anything. But a few games have already been worth staying up for. Early in the season our list leans toward late drama, so read these as the best finishes, not the most important games:
- Wild 2, Canadiens 1 (OT), November 10 in Montreal. Nick Suzuki tied it with 1:38 left in the third, and Kirill Kaprizov won it 21 seconds into overtime. Jesper Wallstedt stopped 27 of 28.
- Lightning 4, Wild 3 (OT), November 7 in St. Paul. Jake Guentzel scored twice and Nikita Kucherov won it 3:23 into overtime.
- Oilers 6, Hurricanes 5 (SO), October 22 in Edmonton. Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl each had two goals and three assists, and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins scored the only goal of the shootout.
All three went past regulation, which makes them great to watch and slightly less useful in April: none of those wins counts as a regulation win.
How The Lineup Is treats these games
In the regular season, Close game matters most, because the single best predictor of a good watch is a close game. Playoff race picks up as the season goes on, because a game in March means more than the same matchup in November. Once the playoffs start, Elimination and Championship take over: win-or-go-home changes everything, and a Stanley Cup Final game, with the trophy on the line, sits at the top. If you follow a team, you get an alert when its game is within 1 goal in the last 3 minutes of the third period, or goes to overtime. Every night's ranked list is on our NHL page.
Sources: NHL.com, "Playoff Format" and "Playoff Tie-Breaking Procedure" (nhl.com/info/standings-info); NHL.com, "NHL releases 2026-27 regular-season schedule" (July 16, 2026). All checked November 11, 2026.
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