The National Hockey League has decided to end the 2019 – 2020 season and has laid out a plan to return with the Stanley Cup playoffs.
After the Coronavirus forced the NHL to suspend its season back on March 12 when teams were around 70 games into the season.
A regular season in the NHL is 82 games and those last remaining few games are crucial and so valuable to teams that are fighting to claw their way into the postseason.
Because of this the NHL needed to come up with a plan that was fair to the teams that were currently out of the playoffs but still had a chance to make it when the NHL put its season on pause.
To do this the NHL came up with a 24 team playoff format, eight more than the traditional 16 team playoff format.
This will feature a qualifying round to determine what teams will make it to the first round of the playoffs.
The 24 teams will include the top 12 teams from each conference the east and the west these teams are seeded by point percentage from the regular season.
The teams from the eastern conference are the Boston Bruins, Tampa Bay Lightning, Washington Capitals, Philadelphia Flyers, Pittsburgh Penguins, Carolina Hurricanes, New York Islanders, Toronto Maple Leafs, Columbus Blue Jackets, Florida Panthers, New York Rangers and Montreal Canadians.
The teams from the western conference are the St Louis Blues, Colorado Avalanche, Vegas Golden Knights, Dallas Stars, Edmonton Oilers, Nashville Predators, Vancouver Canucks, Calgary Flames, Winnipeg Jets, Minnesota Wild, Arizona Coyotes and the Chicago Blackhawks.
The way they have set the playoffs up is that the top four teams from each conference based off of point percentage will automatically have a berth into the first round of the playoffs.
That would include the Boston Bruins, Tampa Bay Lighting, Washington Capitals and the Philadelphia Flyers from the east.
And the St Louis Blues, Colorado Avalanche, Las Vegas Golden Knights and the Dallas Stars from the west all are moving on to the first round of the playoffs.
Since the top four teams from each conference automatically move on to the first round, they needed a way to determine their seeding for the first round of the playoffs to determine what team they’re going to face.
To accomplish this, each of the top four teams will be the three other top teams in their conference in a round robin tournament.
These games will be played with traditional regular season overtime and shoot out rules, if there is a tie. The end of the tournament that will be determined by regular season points percentage.
Then that leaves the eight remaining teams from each conference to play in a best of five qualifying round.
In which the fifth place team is matched up against twelfth place team and the sixth place team is going to play the eleventh place team and so on.
And the winners from those series will move on to the first round of the playoffs to face one of the top four teams in their conference.
It’s still being decided on whether or not if there will be re-seeding at the end of the qualifying round or if teams will just automatically move right into a playoff spot.
But once it’s decided it will give the NHL its traditional 16 team playoff format.
But the first two rounds of the playoffs may look a little different, the league is still deciding on whether or not to have a five game series or the traditional seven game series for the first two rounds.
However, the conference finals and the Stanley Cup Final will have the traditional seven game series.
The NHL wants to award the Stanley Cup to a team this year, rather than scrapping the season, to do this they needed to come up with a fair and entertaining playoff format to give each team a chance to hoist Lord Stanley’s Cup above their heads to become champions.
And LET’S GO FLYERS!!