NHL 2026/27 (M)

The NHL was founded in Montreal on 26 November 1917, twenty-four years after the cup it hands out had first been awarded. That gap explains half the league: the Stanley Cup is not a prize the NHL invented for itself but an older trophy it ended up adopting, which is why it keeps the habit of engraving champions' names into the silver itself instead of making a replica every June.

Between 1942 and 1967 the league shrank to six clubs, and those twenty-five years of closed warfare left the roll of honour that still rules. The Montreal Canadiens hold 24 cups, more than anyone; the Toronto Maple Leafs have 13 and have not won since 1967, the very year that era ended; the Detroit Red Wings have 11.

The league has been growing south and west ever since. The Seattle Kraken took it to 32 franchises in 2021, and in 2024 the Arizona club moved to Salt Lake City, where since last season it has been called the Utah Mammoth. The map now runs from Florida to Edmonton and from San Jose to Boston.

On 14 June 2026 the Carolina Hurricanes won game six of the final 3-0 and closed the series 4-2 against the Vegas Golden Knights. It was their second Stanley Cup and their first since 2006: twenty years of waiting settled with a shutout, which is the most Carolina way to win.

The number that sums up those playoffs is not the final but the road to it: 16 wins in 19 games. Four best-of-seven rounds are usually earned the hard way, seven games at a time, and Carolina came through almost untroubled. Jordan Staal, captain and defensive centre, took the postseason MVP award — in his case a prize for the work away from the puck rather than for points.

Vegas fell one step short of a second cup. They reached the final out of the West and lost the last two games of the series, the decisive one without scoring at all.

This is the season of the new calendar. The collective agreement signed for the 2026-2030 cycle lifts the league from 82 to 84 games per club — the two extra ones are divisional, against rivals everybody already knows too well — and in exchange trims the preseason from six friendlies to four. That makes 1,344 games in all, and it is the first change in length since 1993/94. It opens on 29 September and the regular season closes on 10 April.

The rulebook moves on one very hockey detail too: the emergency goaltender supplied by the home rink is gone — that fan in borrowed gear who occasionally ended up playing in the NHL. Each club now hires its own.

Three outdoor games are spread across the winter: the Heritage Classic in Winnipeg on 25 October, the Winter Classic in Salt Lake City on 31 December and the Stadium Series in Arlington on 20 February. And there is a farewell: the Calgary Flames play their last year at the Scotiabank Saddledome before moving to Scotia Place.

Eighty-four games hand out sixteen places, half the league. Qualification does not come from a single table: each of the four divisions sends its top three, and the two remaining spots in each conference are wild cards for the best of the rest. That mixture is what lets a team with more points than another miss out for being in the wrong division.

Then a different competition begins. Four best-of-seven rounds, sixteen wins, two months. The trophy for the best regular-season record is handed out in April and has protected nobody: in playoffs where a sudden-death overtime can run three extra periods and a hot goaltender can steal a whole series, being the favourite only means starting at home.

The champion takes the cup home, physically. Every player gets a day with it, brings it to their home town and hands it back, and their name stays engraved on it. That is why players talk about it as an object rather than as a title.