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At the halfway point of the inaugural season, the PWHL has announced its playoff format on Wednesday — with one unconventional rule.
The top four teams in the regular-season standings will move on to the post-season, with the top-seeded squad given the opportunity to choose its semi-final opponent between the third and fourth seed.
Each round will be played as a best-of-five series with the traditional home-ice advantage for higher-seeded teams.
Additionally, to ensure competitiveness after the post-season picture is decided, non-playoff teams will be competing to get the first-overall pick in the draft in an unconventional rule called “The Gold Plan.”
Non-playoff teams will be competing for “draft-order points,” starting from elimination of playoff contention and ending at the conclusion of the regular season, which follow the PWHL’s standard points system. The team with the most draft-order points after its final regular season game will select first in each round.
If the draft-order points are the same at the end of the regular season, the league will look to regular-season wins as a tiebreaker. The standings page will reflect draft-order points after teams are mathematically eliminated from the playoffs.
“The perfect complement to the PWHL’s standings structure, in which a team earns three points for a regulation victory, is a process that rewards competitiveness, parity and integrity across the league throughout the regular-season,” senior vice-president of hockey operations Jayna Hefford said. “Winning is prioritized for playoff positioning — and non-playoff teams have to earn the first-overall draft selection, rather than depend on a lottery or repeated losses to improve their chances of securing the top pick.”
In a Zoom media conference on Wednesday, Hefford said that the name of the championship trophy was still under discussion.
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