Something a little different today.
Todays blog is going to be something a little different instead of covering football I will be covering my favorite sport of ice hockey. The season is about a fifth of the way through each team has played around 15 games out of the 82 games played in a season.
For those who don't know the league very well I will give you some basic information that will be helpful as I go along today.
The league is divided into two conferences the Eastern and Western conferences. Each conference has two divisions. The East has the Metropolitan and the Atlantic divisions.
The Metropolitan division is made up of teams including the Columbus Blue Jackets, Carolina Hurricanes, New Jersey Devils, New York has two teams the Islanders and the Rangers, not to be left out are the Philadelphia Flyers and the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Washington Capitals.
The Atlantic division is made up of the Boston Bruins, Buffalo Sabers, Detroit Redwings, Florida Panthers, Montreal Canadians, Ottawa Senators, Tampa Bay Lightning and the Toronto Maple Leafs.
The western Conference is made up of The Pacific and Central divisions. The Pacific is made up of the Anaheim Ducks, Arizona Coyotes, Calgary Flames, Edmonton Oilers, Los Angeles Kings, San Jose Sharks, Vancouver Canucks and the newest team to the league the Vegas Golden Knights.
The Final division is the Central Division the teams in this division are the Chicago Blackhawks, Colorado Avalanche, Dallas Stars, Minnesota Wild, Nashville Predators, St Louis Blues and the Winnipeg Jets.
The way that the post season works is as follows. each of the four divisions guarantee playoff spots the top three teams in the division standings at the end of the year. This makes up 12 of the 16 postseason participants and the other 4 wildcard spots are up for grabs for the other 19 teams who were not included in the top 3 in their respective divisions. The spots are awarded to the two teams in each conference who had the next highest point totals regardless of division.
The way the point system works is that each win by a team gets them the maximum 2 points possible each game. If a team loses at the end of the 60 minute regulation period then that team earns 0 of the two possible points, but if the game goes into overtime meaning an extra 5 minute period each team will earn 1 of the 2 points and the winner of the game in overtime will earn the other point avaliable.
As far as the games go the match ups are the best team in each conference taking on the lowest wildcard participant, The other division winner plays the other wild card team and lastly the teams who placed second and third in each division play each other. The match ups after that depend on who wins each of the series between the teams.
Each playoff series is a best of seven meaning that the first team to win four out of seven games will advance to the next round. The National Hockey League (NHL) post season is made up of four round and the goal is to win four games in each round to win the Stanley Cup. The most valuable player of each Stanley Cup final series regardless of the players team is awarded the Conn Smyth Trophy.