NHL 2020-21 season will have playoff feel right from start

In the West, Central and East, each team will play every other eight times.To qualify for the playoffs, you must finish in the top four in your division. The four teams that advance to the Semifinal Round will be seeded by their points total in the regular season.It's going to be Darwinian, a throwback to the days when divisions had different names."If [the NHL] and [the NHLPA] can pull off a '21 season, the divisional game schedule/playoffs could be terrific," tweeted the great hockey writer Michael Farber, whose plaque hangs in the Hockey Hall of Fame as a winner of the Elmer Ferguson Memorial Award. The pandemic is out of the control of the NHL and the NHLPA.And remember what happened after the 2019-20 season was paused March 12?After a pause of more than four months, the NHL returned with a 24-team tournament in bubbles in Toronto and Edmonton, and the competition was more than worthy of the Stanley Cup, perhaps the toughest ever.The NHL and the NHLPA adapted, and instead of making the best of a bad situation, they turned a bad situation into something spectacular.This will be different, but a similar challenge and opportunity.The North Division is nothing short of special and should be embraced as such. the Los Angeles Kings, you have the teams that finished 1-2-3 in the Western Conference last season: the St. Louis Blues, the Colorado Avalanche and the Golden Knights.Defenseman Alex Pietrangelo, who won the Stanley Cup with the Blues as their captain in 2019 and signed with the Golden Knights as a free agent Oct. 12, will have to face his former team eight times in division games."For me, there's benefits to being in a really tough division," DeBoer told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. NHL, the NHL Shield, the word mark and image of the Stanley Cup, the Stanley Cup Playoffs logo, the Stanley Cup Final logo, Center Ice name and logo, NHL Conference logos, NHL Winter Classic name, and The Biggest Assist Happens Off The Ice are registered trademarks and Stanley Cup Qualifiers name and logo, NHL.TV, Vintage Hockey word mark and logo, The Game Lives Where You Do, NHL Winter Classic logo, NHL Heritage Classic name and logo, NHL Stadium Series name and logo, NHL All-Star logo, NHL Face-Off name and logo, NHL.