NHL Points System: How Standings Work

The NHL points system looks simple — win, get two; lose in overtime, get one; lose in regulation, get nothing — but the math underneath shapes nearly every late-season strategic decision a coaching staff makes. This guide walks through how points are awarded, how the standings are sorted when teams tie, and how the wild-card format slots sixteen teams into the playoffs.

How NHL teams earn points

Every game distributes either two or three points between the two teams:

Outcome	Winning team	Losing team
Regulation win	2	0
Overtime win	2	1
Shootout win	2	1

A regulation game distributes two total points (2–0). An overtime or shootout game distributes three total points (2–1). That asymmetry is the heart of why the standings work the way they do — and why some games are worth more total points to the league than others.

The losing team's point in OT or the shootout is the famous "loser point" (sometimes called the Bettman point, after the commissioner). It exists because the league wants to reward teams for reaching overtime — for not losing in regulation — and it discourages the kind of safe, tied-game-acceptance that plagued the standings before shootouts were introduced in 2005.

A worked example

Two teams play 82 games. Team A wins 45, loses 30 in regulation, and loses 7 in overtime/shootout. Team B wins 42, loses 22 in regulation, and loses 18 in overtime/shootout.

• Team A: (45 × 2) + (7 × 1) = 97 points
• Team B: (42 × 2) + (18 × 1) = 102 points

Team B finishes ahead of Team A despite winning three fewer games. The eleven extra loser points carry the difference. This is the dynamic that makes the NHL's points system different from any other major league: the gap between a 60-minute loss and an OT loss is enormous over a full season.

How ties are broken

When two teams finish with the same point total, the league sorts them in this order:

1. Most regulation wins (RW). A regulation win is the cleanest result — no overtime, no shootout. The team that won the most actual 60-minute games gets the edge first.
2. Most regulation plus overtime wins (ROW). ROW excludes shootout wins. Two teams might have the same RW count; ROW pulls in OT wins (still real hockey) but ignores the skills competition.
3. Total wins (including shootout wins).
4. Head-to-head points in games between the two tied teams (with caveats for unbalanced schedules).
5. Goal differential across the full season.
6. Goals for across the full season.

In practice, RW and ROW decide the vast majority of ties. The deeper tiebreakers matter mostly at the trade deadline and in the final week of the regular season, when staff are projecting playoff seeding and want to know exactly which game they need to win.

The playoff structure: divisions plus wild cards

Sixteen of the league's thirty-two teams qualify for the Stanley Cup playoffs. The format is:

• Top three from each of the four divisions automatically qualify. That's twelve teams: Atlantic 1–3, Metropolitan 1–3, Central 1–3, Pacific 1–3.
• Two wild-card spots per conference. The Eastern Conference (Atlantic + Metro) takes the two best non-division-top-three teams by points; the Western Conference (Central + Pacific) does the same. Four wild-card teams total.

A team that finishes fourth in a brutal division can absolutely jump over the third-place team in a weaker division. That's the wild card doing its job — making the playoff field about quality across the conference, not just standing inside an arbitrary division.

First-round matchups

The division winner with the most points in each conference plays the lower-seeded wild card. The other division winner plays the higher-seeded wild card. Then the two-seed plays the three-seed within each division.

It's a bracket designed to reward division winners while still letting deep divisions send four teams to the postseason — which the Atlantic and Central have both done in multiple recent seasons.

Why the points system is controversial

The loser point creates two persistent debates:

1. The standings inflate. Because three points are available in OT/SO games but only two in regulation, the standings show more total points distributed than would exist in a pure win/loss system. A team can hover around .500 in actual record and still look healthy in the standings — the loser points carry them.

2. Late-game incentives go sideways. A team trailing by one with two minutes left has a perverse interest in not pulling the goalie too aggressively. If they tie it, they're guaranteed a point. If they pull early and get scored on into an empty net, they get nothing. The standings system pays you to play for overtime — which often means playing not to lose, rather than playing to win.

Fixes have been proposed for decades — the simplest is the three-point system used in international play and many European leagues, where a regulation win is worth three points, an OT/SO win is worth two, and an OT/SO loss is worth one. Every game distributes three total points, the asymmetry disappears, and teams have a clear incentive to win in regulation. The NHL has shown no real interest in adopting it.

How to read the standings columns

When you look at a standings page, the columns mean:

• GP — games played
• W — total wins (regulation + OT + SO)
• L — regulation losses only
• OTL — overtime and shootout losses combined (these are the loser-point games)
• PTS — points (the column that actually determines seeding)
• ROW — regulation + overtime wins (tiebreaker)
• GF / GA — goals for, goals against
• DIFF — goal differential

The headline number is always PTS. ROW is the column you check when two teams are tied on PTS and you want to know who's actually ahead in seeding.

The bottom line

The NHL points system rewards winning, but it also rewards not losing in regulation. The loser point inflates the standings, distorts late-game tactics, and protects mediocre teams from falling out of contention. But it also creates one of the great features of NHL hockey: an October game between two non-contenders can still be worth playing aggressively, because there's a point on the line that everyone in the building can feel. Whether that trade-off is worth it is a debate the league has been having since 1999 — and one that, every spring around the trade deadline, you'll see resurface in every cap-and-standings article worth reading.

For a sense of how this plays out at the deadline, see our running coverage of NHL trade rumors and recent NHL analysis.