Win four rounds to get the Stanley Cup
While other sports such as the NBA also have four playoff rounds like the NHL, they are not all seven-game series. Major League Baseball has a best-of-three wild card round, a best-of-five divisional round, and a best-of-seven league championship series before the best-of-seven World Series.
As for the NHL, if a team played all seven games in each round, that team could potentially play 28 extra games. Considering the NHL schedule is 82 games, that’s an extra 34 percent of games a team could play. At a minimum, a team must play 16 games to win it all, assuming they sweep every series.
Since 1987, when the NHL moved to seven games in all four rounds, no team has gone completely unbeaten. Even the Oilers’ dynasty of the 80s had a couple of speedbumps along the way.
The grueling postseason schedule is what makes the NHL playoffs the hardest in all professional sports. Other sports like football play just one game per playoff round. In fact, European soccer doesn’t even have a postseason. The league’s champion is declared at the end of the regular season.
So, in last season’s playoffs, the Oilers played five games against the Kings, seven against the Canucks, six against the Dallas Stars, and seven against the Florida Panthers. That was a total of 25 postseason games.
This point underscores why depth is so important in the playoffs. Teams deal with injuries and fatigue, making depth critical. Moreover, goaltenders pay a huge price in the playoffs. Think of the Panthers’ Sergei Bobrovsky last season. He was so taxed during the playoffs that fans were concerned about his apparent weight loss due to dehydration.
Overall, the NHL playoffs are the single most challenging postseason of any sport, especially considering the physical nature of hockey. Players are true beasts when going through a gauntlet of NHL playoff hockey.