The NHL playoff bracket system works a little different than the NBA Playoff Bracket or the March Madness Bracket. The first round runs as you would think, the highest seed plays the lowest seed. But the second round is re-seeded so that highest remaining seed plays the lowest remaining seed left in the tournament(in their conference). This makes it a little difficult to run a bracket picking contest since you do not know the match ups of the second round. You can still run a pool for this bracket, but we recommend collecting the picks after each round.

We have however created a couple of unique pools for you to run throughout the NHL Playoffs. The first being the NHL Playoff Squares which is similar to the Super Bowl Squares except instead of putting numbers in the top row and left column, you will be putting the Eastern Conference teams in the top row and the Western Conference Teams in the left column. The square that intersects the 2 teams playing in the Stanley Cup Finals wins.

The second pool we created is the NHL Playoff Confidence Pool where you rank the teams in the playoffs from 1 to 16, the team ranked number 16 being the team you think will win the most games in the playoffs. For each time a team wins you are awarded the corresponding point value. The person with the highest total at the end of the playoffs wins!