The NHL loves the parity in the league, but too much of it can make a parody of the standings.
There has been a rash of games going beyond the allotted 60 minutes of regulation early in the 2025-26 season. It’s a symptom a significant league-wide trend — there is a lot of parity, even if this version of the Colorado Avalanche exists.
Nine teams have already played in double-digit games that went to overtime. Twenty — yes, that’s 20, out of 32 — teams have already played 3-on-3 hockey eight times, which is at least 25% of the games they’ve played.
“It’s parity in the league,” Avs coach Jared Bednar said. “Yeah, it’s that simple. COVID, the flat cap, years and years of a flat cap. Teams at the bottom get better quicker. Teams at the top try to stay there. It’s as tight as you can possibly get.
“You’ve got a bunch of teams with the same amount of ability, the same amount of expectations playing each other every night. You’re going to see lots of overtimes.”
Every game that goes to overtime messes with the NHL standings. A game that reaches overtime is worth three total points. A game that ends in regulation is worth two.
The logic makes sense, but it’s a mistake to correct another self-made mistake. When the game gets to overtime, teams only use three skaters instead of five to determine a winner. If that doesn’t work, they go to a coin-flip shootout.
The NHL doesn’t want to punish teams for losing a game in those circumstances as much as losing when normal hockey is played. A better solution in an ideal world would be to not put teams in those situations, but that horse is out of the barn, through the pasture and currently grazing on a hill two towns over.
Four-on-four overtime, or even five-on-five isn’t coming back in the regular season. Ties are not coming back.
So, the standings are altered, but not really to reward teams that win in regulation, but to soften the blow of losing at shinny or in a skills competition. What is the end result after years of a hard salary cap and other financial restrictions slowly compressing the top of the NHL and the bottom closer together?
This year, it is three teams that are actually good at winning games when normal hockey is being played. Then a couple of teams in the next tier that are pretty good at it. And then about 25-ish teams that are all about the same.
Vegas, Anaheim and Minnesota were three-fourths of a four-way tie for fifth place in the NHL standings on Friday afternoon. All three of those teams have won 11 times in regulation, out of either 30 or 31 games plays. Another team that has also won 11 games in regulation?
The St. Louis Blues, who sat in 29th place. The Winnipeg Jets, one spot in front of the Blues, had 12 regulation victories.
Maybe the Wild making a blockbuster trade for superstar defenseman Quinn Hughes on Friday afternoon will lift Minnesota into the top tier of clubs, but there’s another reason for concern: In most NHL seasons, the number of overtime games increases later in the season.
Teams are desperate for points to try and squeeze into the playoffs. They get more conservative, particularly in the third periods of tie games, willing to cede a point to the opponent if it means guaranteeing one for themselves with a dice roll at the second one.
Is there a perfect solution? No, probably not.
Is there a better solution than the current format? Yes, and it turns out Bednar may be a fan of it.
The answer is to make every game worth three points, not just the ones where teams are tied after 60 minutes. Teams would get three points for a regulation win, two points for an overtime/shootout win, one for an overtime/shootout loss and zero for a regulation loss.
Bednar was asked about the surge of overtime games Wednesday morning on his weekly show with Altitude Sports Radio, and he mentioned that maybe three-point games would be better. His rationale is the correct one: It would make more games end in regulation, and reward teams for winning.
Teams would be more desperate to win before overtime, particularly later in the season. It would flip the script — too many late-season NHL games get less exciting because teams play for overtime. This would make third periods of tie games more exciting.
There is a website out there, nhl3points.com, that creates the daily NHL standings if we lived in an alternate world where every game was worth three points. Colorado, as the team with the most regulation wins this season, would benefit from that system.
The Avs would have 71 points as of Friday afternoon, seven more than Dallas and 21 more than Minnesota. Washington would have had a four-point lead on Carolina in the Metro, not tied at the top.
It doesn’t affect where teams are in the standings that much, but it would move a handful of teams around a spot or three. More importantly, it would reward the teams that win in regulation, such as Colorado, Dallas and Washington.
And most importantly, it would improve the overall product. Criticisms of the three-point game system include that fans don’t want to see four numbers in the standings — the Avs would 20-2-7-2 instead of 22-2-7, as an example. There’s also been a belief that increasing the gap between teams would make fans feel like their club in 10th or 11th place in the conference has less of a chance to make the playoffs and therefore disengage earlier.
That’s not true. Fans would adapt. And watching a team go on a big run and shooting up the standings in February or March would be even more fun.
The games, and the league, would be better for it in the long run. I think Bednar agrees, even if he didn’t fully commit to it on the radio.
Just as his media availability was ending Friday, I asked him if he is actually a bigger three-point game proponent than he let on during his radio show. His response was, “I don’t know,” but after spending two-plus years around the Avs coach and trying to learn how he thinks about the sport … I’d bet that he is.
And he’d be right.
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