AWAY — Away record. The record of the team when they are playing away from their home rink. Again, there are only 16 of the 31 teams that make the playoffs. Each conference provides 8 playoff spots: the first 6 are comprised of the top 3 point-earning teams in each division.
Note: During the season there is no wildcard playoff spots and the top 4 teams in the division will make the playoffs. As well, there is no cross-division play — the first two rounds of the playoffs will be within the respective division.
In determining who is in the playoffs and who is not, the Wild Card version is the most important. League — This is a list of all the NHL teams in order of their point totals from greatest to least. It has no bearing on how teams are placed in the playoffs, and may be most useful to see who is at the bottom in helping to determine placement in the NHL draft.
Conference — This version divides the teams into their respective conferences: Eastern and Western. Now, to reach the Stanley Cup finals, you have to beat out the teams in your conference to get there, but this version of the standings does not give a definitive answer as to who you would be playing if the playoffs started today. This is more relevant because the top 3 in each division will make it to the playoffs. The winner of each division gets one of the two top seeds in their conference in the playoffs.
The second and third place teams in a division will end up meeting in round one of the playoffs. Wild Card — This view of the standings is a combination of the Division and Conference standings. The view shows the top three teams in each of the two divisions within the conference. The rest of the conference is then placed under the divisions in a wild card race for the final spots to make the playoffs.
The top two point leaders in the wild card race qualify for the playoffs and play the two division winners. Z — it means it has clinched the conference and their division title and will finish first in the conference.
Y — it means it has clinched their division title and will finish first in the division. There you go, now you can read the NHL standings! Remember that as you watch your team throughout the season, the standings will change a lot. Teams can go on a winning or losing streak and in a couple of weeks be in a very different position.
Enjoy the rollercoaster ride that is an NHL season! The problem: Three-on-three overtime is one of the best things that the NHL has going while the shootout is one of the worst. Even if you believe that 3v3 is somewhat of a gimmick and not a true representation of a team's overall hockey ability, you have to admit that it's often an insanely entertaining thrill ride that's impossible to look away from. And you also have to admit it's less of a gimmick than the shootout, which is a glorified skills competition that somehow has too many rules no spin-o-ramas and not enough rules the speed at which players can approach.
There's no bigger buzzkill than when a riveting three-on-three OT leads to a shootout. It's like getting off a roller coaster at a theme park and going straight to wait in line for the bathroom.
And while the number of shootouts has dipped since the league switched from 4v4 overtime to 3v3 in , it's still too high if you ask me. The solution: Just increase the length of three-on-three overtime to further minimize the number of games that ultimately make it to a shootout. If you bump OT from five minutes to 10 minutes, you get more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff.
But if some games are going to still make it to the shootout, why don't we attempt to fix that too while we're at it? There haven't been many memorable shootouts in recent memory -- at least not at the NHL level. Think about the last great shootout you remember. What was it? Let me guess, it was this one:. Yeah, thought so. Jocelyne Nicole Lamoureux-Davidson's game winner in the Winter Olympics of course comes to mind as well, but she only shot twice in that shootout. Oshie was sent to the ice SIX times, and scored on four of them.
That's the chaos I'm going for with this. NHL shootouts would be a lot more interesting if they took the international rules and allowed the best players to take multiple attempts, notably like Oshie did in the clip above.
You'd likely have more goals, more highlights and the potential for epic player-vs-player showdowns to remember. Imagine an Oilers-Avalanche game goes to OT and still can't find a winner.
Are you bummed, or are you excited about the possibility of seeing Connor McDavid and Nathan MacKinnon square off in a back-and-forth breakaway showdown? Even if the NHL made three different different skaters take attempts before getting to use a repeat shooter it would be an improvement from the current state of things.
The Problem: In , the league switched away from a scheduling format that saw teams play 32 inter-divisional games, 72 within the conference and only 10 out of conference.
Now, every team plays 29 games within their division games per opponent , 21 games within the conference 3 games per non-divisional opponent and 32 out of conference games 2 games per opponent. That may be part of the reason the league changed its playoff format in to put an emphasis on divisional rivalries.
Instead of using a straight-up seeding format, each conference is broken up into two separate divisional brackets. While each division winner draws a Wild Card, the two- and three-seeds in each division automatically match up against one another in the first round. The most glaring issue with all of this is that a strong division forces good, successful teams into tougher and more unfair first-round matchups than they deserve.
That adds up to 16 teams in the East. The Western Conference is next, starting with the Central division apparently back to alphabetical order. The Central consists of Cup winner St. This is the only division with seven teams instead of eight.
When NHL Seattle starts play in as the league's 32nd franchise, Arizona will move to the Central division to form four eight-team divisions. The divisional standings format is the default mode because the first 12 teams to qualify for each spring's team playoffs derive from the first-, second- and third-place teams in each division.
That covers six of eight spots in the Eastern Conference and same for the West. Next it gets a bit more complicated because the fourth-place finishers in each division are not guaranteed to qualify for the playoffs.
The final two spots in each conference are awarded to the two remaining "Wild Card" teams in the conference with the best record. It could be the fourth-place teams from each division or two from the same division fourth- and fifth-place finishers. This Wild-Card format, sometimes labeled "Playoffs" by media, keeps more fans engaged and hopeful. That's why most media outlets list NHL standings for both "Division" and "Wild Card"-prompting newbies to ask hockey-fans friends to explain, hey, why the two formats?
Here's a quick example: The Chicago Blackhawks, who won three Stanley Cups in the just-finished decade, are dead last in the Central Division. But the team's fans might take heart that the 'Hawks are within a four- or five-game winning streak of being atop the wild-card standings.
Fun fact: North American sports vernacular is "standings" while European soccer fans refer to team places in their leagues as "tables. Let's turn to the columns in NHL standings, especially the concept of team points. When an NHL wins a game, it is awarded two points. With an game regular season schedule, there is a maximum of points for any team. If NHL teams surpass points, it almost always qualifies them as a top-three finisher in their divisions.
The top team each year is usually above points. Last season, Tampa Bay finished with an incredible points.
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