The 2026-27 NHL season is the first with an 84-game regular season. The league added two games per team for this season, and it started earlier than usual, on September 29, 2026. Here is how the season is laid out, how the standings and overtime work, and how the 16 playoff teams are chosen. The dates and the game count come from the NHL's own schedule and stats data.
Key dates
| Stage | Dates |
|---|---|
| Preseason | Mid to late September 2026 |
| Regular season opens | September 29, 2026 |
| Regular season ends | Around April 10, 2027 |
| Stanley Cup playoffs | From mid-April 2027 |
| Latest scheduled end of the Final | June 10, 2027 |
In the first full week of October 2026 the league has 9 games on Tuesday, October 6, 10 on Thursday, October 8 and 14 on Saturday, October 10, which gives an idea of how busy a normal week is.
Teams and divisions
There are 32 teams in two conferences. The Eastern Conference has the Atlantic and Metropolitan divisions, and the Western Conference has the Central and Pacific divisions, with eight teams in each division. Teams play their division rivals most often, and every team visits every other team's arena at least once over the season.
How points work
The standings are based on points, not wins:
- A win, in regulation, overtime or a shootout, is worth 2 points.
- Losing after regulation, in overtime or the shootout, is worth 1 point.
- A loss in regulation is worth 0 points.
When two teams finish on the same points, the first tiebreaker is regulation wins, which is why you will sometimes see an RW column in standings tables.
Overtime in the regular season
If a regular-season game is tied after three 20-minute periods, the teams play up to five minutes of sudden-death overtime with three skaters a side. If nobody scores, the game goes to a shootout: three shooters per team to start, then one at a time until one team scores and the other does not. A game decided this way is marked OT or SO next to the final score.
The playoffs
Sixteen teams qualify, eight per conference. The top three teams in each division get in automatically. The last two places in each conference go to wild cards, the two teams with the most points among the rest. The division winner with the best record in the conference plays the second wild card, and the other division winner plays the first wild card. The 2nd and 3rd teams in each division play each other.
All four rounds are best of seven, and the higher-seeded team is at home for games 1, 2, 5 and 7. Playoff overtime does not use three-on-three or shootouts. Overtime periods last 20 minutes with five skaters per side, and they keep coming until a goal is scored, so a long one can go on well past midnight in the arena's time zone.
When games start
Weeknight games in the Eastern time zone usually start at 7:00 or 7:30 PM local time, with Central, Mountain and Pacific games after that. In UTC, a full night runs from about 23:00 to around 03:00 until the US clock change on November 1, then from about midnight to 04:00. Saturdays often include afternoon games as well, and so do some holidays.
The NHL page on Methstreams lists every game for the next seven days and shows puck drop on your own clock, so you can see straight away which games fall in your evening.
