The NHL: how the season and the playoffs work.

Where the 2026-27 season stands

The 2026-27 regular season opened on Tuesday 29 September 2026, when the Carolina Hurricanes raised their Stanley Cup banner before hosting the Florida Panthers. NHL.com's schedule announcement puts the last day of the regular season on Saturday 10 April 2027. On 21 October 2026 the season is in progress, about three weeks in. There is no 2027 Stanley Cup champion and no 2026-27 Presidents' Trophy winner, and this page will not guess at either.

Teams and alignment

Wikipedia and several published team-list guides describe a league of 32 teams split into two conferences: the Eastern Conference, with the Atlantic and Metropolitan divisions, and the Western Conference, with the Central and Pacific divisions, eight teams to a division. We could not confirm that alignment on an official NHL page. The schedule figures NHL.com does publish fit it: 84 games per team and 1,344 games in all.

The newest club is in Utah. According to NHL.com, the league's Board of Governors deactivated the Arizona Coyotes franchise in April 2024 and the new Utah team received all of the Coyotes' hockey assets, including the roster and draft picks. It played its first regular-season game on 8 October 2024, a 5-2 win over Chicago, as the Utah Hockey Club, and became the Utah Mammoth by May 2025 after a branding process that included a fan vote. Its home arena is the Delta Center.

A longer schedule in 2026-27

Each team played 82 regular-season games through 2025-26. For 2026-27 the schedule grows to 84 games per team, and NHL.com describes the 1,344-game total as an all-time high.

How a regular-season game is decided

Under the NHL Official Rules 2026-2027 (Rule 84), a regular-season game is three 20-minute periods. If the score is level after regulation:

• Each team is given one point in the standings.
• The teams play one sudden-death overtime of up to five minutes, with three skaters and a goalkeeper each. The first team to score wins and takes a second point.
• If overtime is scoreless, the game goes to a shootout. Each team gets three shots, and if it is still tied the shootout carries on in sudden-death rounds. No player may shoot twice until every eligible teammate has shot.
• The winning team is credited with one more goal than its opponent in the final score, however many shootout goals were scored.

Sports Illustrated sums up the points system: two points for any win, one for an overtime or shootout loss, and none for a loss in regulation. Rule 84 also lets a team pull its goalkeeper for an extra skater in overtime, but a team that loses while its net is empty gives up the point it earned at the end of regulation, unless the goalie was pulled for a delayed penalty.

These rules are relatively recent. Sports Illustrated and Wikipedia both date the end of tied games and the arrival of the shootout to the 2005-06 season. The Globe and Mail reported in June 2015 that the Board of Governors had approved a switch from 4-on-4 to 3-on-3 overtime from 2015-16, to cut the number of games settled by shootouts. For the wider rules of play, see how hockey works.

The playoffs

Sixteen teams reach the Stanley Cup playoffs. NHL.com's playoff format page sets out how they are chosen:

• The top three teams in each division qualify automatically, which accounts for 12 places.
• The other four places are wild cards: the next two best teams in each conference, regardless of division. One division can therefore send five teams and the other three.
• The division winner with the better record plays the lower-ranked wild card, the other division winner plays the other wild card, and the second- and third-place teams in each division meet.
• The bracket is fixed and is not reseeded as teams are knocked out.
• Every round is best of seven. In the first two rounds the team that finished higher has home ice; in the conference finals and the Stanley Cup Final it goes to the team with the better regular-season record.

The Canadian Press notes that this division-based format dates from the 2013-14 realignment. Playoff overtime is different from the regular season. Under Rule 84.5 of the 2026-2027 rules, a game tied after regulation continues, after a 15-minute intermission, with full 20-minute periods until someone scores. Sports Illustrated adds that playoff overtime is played five-on-five and never goes to a shootout.

The Presidents' Trophy

The Presidents' Trophy goes to the team with the best regular-season record on points. It is separate from the Stanley Cup. Recent winners, from Hockey-Reference:

Colorado clinched the 2025-26 trophy with a 3-1 win over Calgary on 9 April 2026, according to NHL.com, when it stood 52-16-10 with 114 points. Hockey-Reference lists the final record as 55-16-11 and 121 points; the smaller numbers were the total on the night it clinched. A report from theScore, seen only in a search summary, gave the clinching score as 2-1; NHL.com and Denver Sports both say 3-1. NHL.com also says it was Colorado's fourth Presidents' Trophy, after 1996-97, 2000-01 and 2020-21, that Detroit has won the award most often with six, and that Boston, the Rangers and Colorado have four each. Colorado was then swept by Vegas in the 2026 Western Conference Final, as the Stanley Cup page explains.

Dates to know in 2026-27

NHL.com's schedule release lists these special events. None had been played by 21 October 2026.

The 2027 All-Star Game is a 3-on-3 round robin between five teams: Canada, Finland, Sweden, the United States and a World team. For where to watch, see watching hockey. For how the league began in 1917, see the founding of the NHL.