NHL

The National Hockey League (NHL for short) is the top level professional ice hockey league within North America. It is also considered to be the league with the best talented players worldwide and indeed this fact is proven by the large number of European players at top caliber that play in the NHL. The fact that the NHL has the best talent is tied directly to the fact that they are the richest league around. The NHL has existed for over a century now and has gone from a start of a six team league to now being a league of thirty teams all vying for the league championship on a year by year basis.

Organization

The organization of the NHL is such that the thirty teams are sub-divided into two conferences of fifteen teams each. The conferences are referred to as the Eastern Conference and the Western Conference based on the rough geographical location of the teams and the conferences are then further sub-divided into three divisions each. Thus is each team placed in a division immediate with four or five other teams and each team is placed in a conference with fourteen other teams. The organization of the NHL has been like this for about a decade; eventually changing from a system where there were only two divisions in each conference. As a matter of historical interest, the conferences were known as the Prince of Wales Conference and the Clarence Campbell conference back then.

Schedule

A typical NHL year would start in the later summer and early fall with what are known as pre-season or exhibition games. These games are just designed to allow the players to ease back into playing form and do not formally count for anything. The actual season starts in October, where the teams face off against each other in the regular season.

The regular season is similar to round robin formats and it sees each team play 82 games; 41 in their home rink and 41 in the rink of an opponent. Each team will play 8 games against every other team in their division, 2-4 games against the teams in the same conference but in the other two divisions and games against a smattering of teams from the other conference in order to fill the space in. A team is awarded points based on how they perform in the games and around mid-Spring in the following year the top eight teams in both conferences advance to the playoffs.

The playoffs see the highest ranked team in each conference face off against the eighth ranked team in the conference, the second against the seventh and so forth. Each series is best of seven, with the first team to win four games advancing to the next round. In this way, sixteen teams are cut down to eight, then to four and finally to two which face off for the ultimate prize; the Stanley Cup. The Stanley Cup is usually contested around June and once it is won, the players break until the pre-season begins again.