Stanley Cup playoffs
Eight teams from each of the league's two conferences qualify for the playoffs based on regular season points totals.
The NHL is the only one of the big four major leagues in Canada and the United States to refer to its playoffs by the name of its championship trophy, a tradition which has arisen because the Stanley Cup is North America's oldest professional sports trophy, dating back more than two decades before the establishment of the NHL.
Since there is no attention paid to divisional alignment with the wild cards, it is possible for one division in a conference to have five teams in the postseason while the other has just three.
Thereafter, it goes to the team with the better regular season record (regardless of seeding); in the case of a tie, the league's standard tie-breaking procedure is applied.
[5]: 23–24 The entire Stanley family supported the sport, the sons and daughters all playing and promoting the game.
In 1914, the Victoria Aristocrats of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association (PCHA) challenged the NHA and Cup champion Toronto Blueshirts.
The PCHA continued to award their league title to the team that finished in first place after the regular season.
The NHL inherited the NHA's regular season system of dividing it into two halves, with the top team from each half moving on to the league finals.
In 1920, the Ottawa Senators were automatically declared the league champion when the team had won both halves of the regular season.
The two halves format was abandoned the next year, and the top two teams faced off for the NHL championship in a two-game total goals series.
[7] With the merger of the PCHA and WCHL in 1925 and the merged league's collapse in 1926, the NHL took de facto control of the Stanley Cup.
[9] The 1967 expansion saw the number of teams double from six to twelve for the 1967–68 season, and with it the creation of the West and East divisions.
The following year had one minor change to its playoff format: a stronger team would face a weaker opponent.
The 1974–75 season saw another change to the playoff system to accommodate a league that had expanded to 18 teams in two conferences and four divisions.
The 1977–78 season had one minor change in its playoff format: although the second-place finishers from each division would qualify for the preliminary round, the four playoff spots reserved for the third-place teams were replaced by four wild-card spots—spots for the four teams with the highest regular season point total that did not finish first or second in their divisions.
The four division winners qualified for the playoffs while twelve wild-card positions rounded out the sixteen teams.
[9] The 1981–82 season brought forth the return of divisional matchups, with the top four teams from each division qualifying for the playoffs.
Home ice advantage was determined by higher seed in the first three rounds and by regular season points of the two teams in the Stanley Cup Finals.
As a result of the pandemic prematurely ending the 2019–20 regular season, a 24-team, conference-based format (with 12 from each conference) was adopted for the 2020 playoffs.
Seeding was based on each team's points percentage at the time the regular season was suspended on March 12.
The top four teams competed in a round-robin tournament to determine final seeding in the First Round, while the bottom eight seeds in each conference played in a best-of-five series to determine who advanced to face one of the Round-Robin teams in the First Round, after which they were re-seeded 5th–8th.
The four division champions were reseeded based on regular season point total in the Stanley Cup Semifinals.
[12][dubious – discuss] The Presidents' Trophy winner may have to go through other playoff clubs who might have a better goaltender, a better defensive team, or other players that pose matchup problems.
If the regular season champion's primary success was only outscoring others, they may be out of luck facing goaltenders that can shut them out.
In four instances an NHL team has been able to come back from being down 0–3 to win a seven-game series: the 1941–42 Toronto Maple Leafs, the 1974–75 New York Islanders, the 2009–10 Philadelphia Flyers, and the 2013–14 Los Angeles Kings.
There has been only one such "reverse sweep" comeback in MLB postseason (the 2004 Boston Red Sox) and none in the NBA playoffs.
Doug Gilmour and Peter Forsberg, in 1986 and 1999, respectively, are the only players who have topped the postseason in scoring without making it to the Finals.
[16][17][18] At the conclusion of a playoff series, players and coaches line up and exchange handshakes with their counterparts on the opposing team, and this has been described by commentators as "one of the great traditions in sports".
[19] However, there have been rare occasions that individual players have refused to participate, such as Gerry Cheevers who left the ice without shaking hands with any of the Flyers in 1978,[20] and Billy Smith who avoided handshakes as he was particularly passionate about losses.
[21] More recent examples of players refusing the handshake include the 1996 playoffs when several Detroit Red Wings players protested the dirty hit by the Colorado Avalanche's Claude Lemieux,[22] and in the 2008 playoffs when Martin Brodeur refused to shake Sean Avery's hand after Avery screened him in an earlier game.
