How NHL Standings Work: Points & ROW

If you want to know how NHL standings work, the first thing to understand is that the league does not rank teams by record. It ranks them by points, and a team can lose more games than a rival and still finish above them. That single quirk shapes late-season tactics, trade deadline decisions, and the entire shape of the playoff race.

This guide covers how points are awarded, what every column on a standings page means, how the league breaks ties, and what the new 84-game schedule does to the numbers you have spent years comparing against.

How NHL standings work: the points math

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 game settled in regulation distributes two total points. A game that goes past 60 minutes distributes three. That asymmetry is the heart of the whole system: some games are worth more to the standings than others, and nobody knows which kind of game they are in until the clock hits zero in the third.

The point the losing team collects in overtime or the shootout is the "loser point" (or the Bettman point, after the commissioner). It exists to reward teams for reaching overtime rather than losing in regulation, and it was designed to kill the dead, tied-game hockey that existed before the shootout arrived in 2005. For the format of the extra session itself, see our NHL overtime rules guide.

How to read the standings columns

A standings page uses the same columns everywhere, and most of the confusion comes from two of them:

• GP — games played (84 in a full season as of 2026-27)
• W — total wins, including overtime and shootout wins
• 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 plus overtime wins
• GF / GA — goals for, goals against
• DIFF — goal differential

The two that trip people up are L and ROW. The L column is not "games lost" — a team can lose 30 times and show far fewer than 30 in that column, because overtime losses live in OTL instead. And ROW is not a typo for "row"; it is the tiebreaker column, explained next.

What ROW means and why it exists

ROW is Regulation plus Overtime Wins: every win a team has except the ones that came in a shootout.

The league tracks it separately because a shootout is not hockey. It is a skills competition bolted onto the end of a tie, and the NHL decided that a team whose record was padded by shootout wins should not outrank a team that won the same number of games in live play. So when two teams finish level on points, ROW is one of the first numbers checked.

You will also see RW — regulation wins only — which now sits ahead of ROW in the tiebreaker order. Together they form a sort of quality filter on the win column: RW asks who won in 60 minutes, ROW asks who won without a shootout, and W asks who won at all.

A worked example

Two teams play 84 games. Team A wins 45, loses 32 in regulation, and loses 7 in overtime or the shootout. Team B wins 42, loses 24 in regulation, and loses 18 past regulation.

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

Team B finishes five points ahead despite winning three fewer games. The eleven extra loser points carry the difference.

This is the dynamic that makes the NHL's standings unlike any other major league. A team that loses close is rewarded; a team that loses big and wins big is not. Over a full season the gap between a 60-minute loss and an overtime loss compounds into playoff spots.

How NHL standings ties are broken

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

1. Most regulation wins (RW). The cleanest result on the board — no overtime, no shootout.
2. Most regulation plus overtime wins (ROW). Pulls in overtime wins but still ignores the shootout.
3. Total wins, shootout wins included.
4. Head-to-head points in games between the tied teams, with adjustments when the teams did not play an equal number of games against each other.
5. Goal differential across the full season.
6. Goals for across the full season.

RW and ROW settle the overwhelming majority of ties. The later steps matter mainly in the last week of the season, when a coaching staff is working out exactly which game they need and whether an empty-net goal against is going to cost them a seed.

What the standings actually decide

Points determine two things: which teams make the postseason, and who plays who once they get there. Sixteen of the league's thirty-two teams qualify — the top three in each of the four divisions, plus two wild cards per conference.

That structure means the standings are read in slices, not top to bottom. A team can be eighth in the conference on points and still be outside the picture, or fifth and comfortably in, depending on how the divisional slots fall. The full bracket, seeding rules, and wild-card mechanics are covered in our NHL playoff format guide.

What the 84-game schedule changes

The 2026-27 season is the first played over 84 games since 1993-94, up from 82 — the first schedule change since 1995-96. Each club now plays its seven divisional opponents four times, with 42 home dates and 42 road dates.

For the standings, two things follow:

• The maximum possible points total is now 168, not 164. Nobody will get close, but every points-pace projection you see in January is built off that ceiling.
• Historical points totals are no longer directly comparable. A 100-point season used to mean something specific about a team's rate of play. Two extra games means two more chances at two points apiece, so the round numbers fans have used as shorthand for decades have quietly shifted upward.

Expect the "how many points to make the playoffs" rules of thumb to drift upward over the next few seasons as everyone recalibrates. The mechanism has not changed; the denominator has.

Why the points system is controversial

The loser point creates two persistent complaints.

The standings inflate. Because three points are available in overtime games and only two in regulation, more points exist in the table than a pure win-loss system would produce. A team hovering around .500 in real terms can still look healthy on the standings page, propped up by loser points.

Late-game incentives go sideways. A team trailing by one with two minutes left has a perverse interest in not pulling the goalie too early. Tie it, and a point is guaranteed. Pull early, concede into the empty net, and the night is worth nothing. The system pays teams to play for overtime, which usually means playing not to lose.

The most common proposed fix is the three-point system used in international play and most European leagues: three points for a regulation win, two for an overtime or shootout win, one for an overtime or shootout loss. Every game distributes three points, the asymmetry disappears, and regulation wins become genuinely valuable rather than a tiebreaker footnote. The NHL has shown no interest in adopting it.

The bottom line

NHL standings reward winning, but they also reward not losing in regulation. Points are the only column that decides anything; ROW is the column you check the moment two teams are level. The loser point inflates the table, distorts third-period tactics, and keeps mediocre teams alive in the race longer than their record deserves — which is either the system's worst flaw or its best feature, depending on whether your team is chasing or being chased.

For the roles behind the results, the hockey positions guide covers who does what on the ice, and the hockey stats glossary explains the numbers analysts use when the points column alone is not telling the whole story. For how this plays out in-season, see our NHL trade rumors and recent NHL analysis.