Dallas and Minnesota are playing each other in the first round of the NHL playoffs again. Not for the first time. Not for the second time. The third time in ten years, same two franchises, same division, same result baked into the bracket before a single puck drops. And every time it happens, the NHL playoff format spits out the same answer: this is fine, actually.
Here’s how the current format works. The top two seeds in each conference are the division winners, who each play a wild card team in round one. Every second and third-place team in the same division is matched against each other. It doesn’t matter if those two teams have 110 and 102 points respectively and would be the favorites to meet in a conference final under any rational system. They’re in the same division, so they play in May instead.
Colorado won the Central with 115 points. Their round-one opponent is the LA Kings, who scraped into the playoffs with 89. Dallas finished second with 110 points and gets Minnesota, third with 102. Those are the two matchups produced by the same division on the same bracket. One of them is a potential five-game walkover. The other is a conference-finals series disguised as a first-round series. The NHL playoff format decided both are equally fine.
The NHL Playoff Format Has Broken the Same Matchup Three Times
Dallas beat Minnesota in round one in 2016. Dallas beat Minnesota in round one in 2023. In 2026, they are playing each other in round one again.
That is not a coincidence and it is not a bad year for the format. It is the format working exactly as designed, over and over, on the same two teams. The Central Division has been one of the best in hockey for most of the last decade, and the NHL playoff format’s response to a stacked division is to guarantee its second and third-best teams eliminate each other before the second round.
Minnesota GM Bill Guerin said at the GM Meetings what anyone watching the standings has known for months: “The second-best team in the league shouldn’t be playing the third-best team in the league in the first round.” He’s right. What makes it stranger is that Matt Duchene, a forward on the Dallas Stars, the team with home ice in this series, said the same thing. “They have to fix it. I’m dead serious.” The guy with the better seed in this matchup doesn’t want the matchup. Both sides of the ice agree this series is in the wrong round. Gary Bettman disagrees.
What 1-8 Seeding Actually Looks Like for the 2026 NHL Playoff Format
Seed the Western Conference 1 through 8 by points, no division barrier. Here’s what the bracket becomes:
Colorado (115 pts) vs. LA Kings (89 pts). Dallas (110 pts) vs. Anaheim (90 pts). Minnesota (102 pts) vs. Edmonton (90 pts). Vegas (91 pts) vs. Utah (90 pts).
Every team in the 2026 Western bracket has at least 89 points. Nobody gets a soft series under either format. The difference is that under 1-8, Dallas plays Anaheim and Minnesota plays Edmonton, instead of playing each other. Two of the conference’s best teams are still alive in round two. The second-best team in the league isn’t going home in May.
Duchene made this exact point. “There are teams eliminated that are ahead of teams that aren’t. It’s all over the league. And it’s not just us, because we have to go through the best teams.” He said that standing in a Dallas locker room after a win, knowing his team is locked into the toughest possible round-one draw despite having the second-most points in the Western Conference. The fix is not complicated. Bettman has simply decided not to make it.
Bettman Calls the Current NHL Playoff Format “Probably the Best in Any Sport”
That is a real quote. Per The Athletic’s Pierre LeBrun, Bettman said he was “more than comfortable” with the current setup and called it “probably the best playoff first round in any sport.”
The argument he’s making is that the divisional bracket creates rivalries and intensity in round one, which produces more competitive series and more games. That part is true. Dallas-Minnesota is going to be outstanding hockey and it would have been in any round. But Bettman’s defense of the NHL playoff format is essentially: we get more drama out of round one because we burn the best teams against each other earlier. That is not a defense of the system. That is a description of the problem.
The NBA seeds 1 through 8 by conference record. The result is that the best teams have the clearest path to the conference final, and the matchups in the later rounds reflect who actually earned it during the season. The NHL chose a different path, and the commissioner is comfortable defending it regardless of what the bracket produces.
This is not only a Western Conference problem. In the East this year, the Pittsburgh Penguins play the Philadelphia Flyers in round one. Second and third in the Metropolitan Division, same format, same result. Metro rivalries in May, conference final talent out before June.
The NHL Playoff Format Changes When the Business Case Changes
The format has been in place since 2014. Bettman built it to produce divisional matchups in round one because divisional matchups mean rivalry games, and rivalry games mean ticket sales, regional TV numbers, and fan engagement in local markets. None of that is a secret. The NHL playoff format was not designed to be fair. It was designed to be profitable in round one.
It stays until the math shifts. When Presidents’ Trophy winners keep losing early because the bracket front-loaded their conference’s best competition into round one, the regular season starts to feel pointless. When 100-point teams go home in May for the third time in ten years because of a zip code, the people buying those tickets start to notice. That’s when the calculation changes.
Until then, Bettman is more than comfortable, Guerin and Duchene are dead serious, and Dallas is playing Minnesota in round one of the NHL playoffs for the third time in a decade because the format said so.
