Printable 2026 NHL Playoff Bracket; Schedule and Matchups

We have the printable 2026 NHL Playoff bracket in PDF up for you to use for free. The bracket is blank until the playoff seeds are set at the conclusion of regular season play. The 2026 NHL Playoffs start on or around April 17th, 2026 and run through mid-late June. Once we get closer to the playoffs, the NHL will confirm the exact start date for us as well as the bookends for the Stanley Cup Finals. 

How Many NHL Teams Earn a Berth in the 2026 Stanley Cup Playoff? 

So, the NHL is sorta set up like the NBA Playoff Bracket with 16 teams earning postseason berths. There is no play-in game in the NHL playoff schedule. We also seed the teams based on points and not straight up W-L percentages, and so on. The three divisional winners in each conference and top two teams in each division earn playoff spots. Then, the top 2 remaining teams independent of division win the last two spots. In the bracket, the top 2 seeds take on the Wild Card teams too, so its setup is a tad different there as well. Does it all make sense? 

What is the Format of the NHL Playoff Series? 

Every series in the Stanley Cup Playoffs is a best of seven machup. The teams will rotate between locations based on the rotation in use. We can expect it to be similar if not the same as past postseasons with a HHAAHAH rotation. In this setup, H stands for the home team of the better team (or seed closer to the #1). The first team to win four games wins the series and moves on to the next round of play. 

NHL Seed Determination for the Postseason

So, for the NHL Playoffs, the best team in each conference is the overall #1 seed. They play the lower ranked wild card team in the first round of the playoffs (WC2 on the bracket). The #2 ranked team plays the better wild card team (WC 1 on the bracket). Done the same in each conference. Then you see the remaining teams paired up by seed. We don’t reseed in the NHL playoffs anymore (has been a few years). 

Printable 2026 NHL Playoff Bracket 

We have a blank, printable 2026 NHL Playoff bracket posted up for you. It’s in image format above and you can print it out to PDF format too. When we get the final bracket seeds and matchups set from the NHL regular season, we’ll come back and update you. Once we see the 2025-26 regular season schedules published, we’ll also update you with an initial NHL Playoff Picture. You can look at the list of all of the Stanley Cup winners while you wait for the playoffs to get here too.