National Hockey League

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The National Hockey League (NHL) is a professional hockey league with teams across Canada and the United States. Comprised of 32 teams, divided into two Conferences (Eastern and Western) and four Divisions each (Atlantic and Metropolitan in the East and Central and Pacific in the West), the NHL teams play for their top championship, the Stanley Cup.

The teams play 82 game seasons (41 at home and 41 away), and every team plays every other team at least twice (once at home and once away), notably the NHL (unlike the NBA -- which uses Christmas Day to feature top-ranked matchups and has done so for years, dating back to when it lacked popularity) and the NFL (which occasionally schedules games on Christmas Day), the NHL does not schedule any games on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, or Boxing Day (December 26). (The MLB season ends in mid-November.)

In the playoffs, the three top teams from each division plus two wild-card teams from each conference which have the best records not among the top three in a division advance to a playoff phase where a best of seven series are played between the seeded teams. The division winner with the best record in the conference plays the lowest-seeded wild card, while the other division winner plays the higher-seeded wild card, and the 2nd place team from each division plays the 3rd place team from the same division. Previously, the NHL re-seeded teams after the first round, but no longer does so.

Canadian and American players make up the majority of the players in the NHL, however many skilled players have been brought into the league from Europe, making it a premier place for playing hockey. The large number of Canadian players and the large support for the sport of hockey make the NHL a popular draw in Canada, with playoff hockey actually drawing more viewers in Canada than in the United States.

The NHL is mostly popular in the upper United States, Canada, and European countries that speak Germanic and Slavic languages.

On December 4, 2018, the NHL announced the approval of a proposed expansion to Seattle, Washington for the 2021-22 NHL season[1] which would be the 32nd team. On July 23, 2020, the new franchise announced that its team name will be the Seattle Kraken (named for the mythological beast of Scandinavian folklore) and also announced the team's colors, branding and home jersey.[2] The successful addition of a Seattle team to the NHL with the introduction of the Kraken follows more than four decades after an ill-fated previous attempt to bring the league to Seattle (first through a conditional expansion franchise, then an attempt to buy the then-struggling Pittsburgh Penguins and transfer the team to Seattle) in 1976, followed by a second attempt in the early 1990s.

The NHL was recently listed as one of numerous leftist-controlled companies that have gone "woke" and now support the criminal rioters of Antifa and Black Lives Matter in the wake of the 2020 leftist riots.[3] However, it stopped requiring players to participate in Pride events, due to a large number of players from Russia who would face criminal prosecution in their home country if they did so.


List of Teams

Eastern Conference

Atlantic Division
Metropolitan Division

Western Conference

Central Division
Pacific Division

References

  1. Seattle NHL expansion approved by Board of Governors at NHL.com
  2. Seattle Kraken official website
  3. Here Are The Companies That Support Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and Want You Dead at Gab.com