from Ryan Dixon of Sportsnet,

This all feels a bit weird, right?

Though we’ve had weeks to talk about how the Stanley Cup Playoffs were about to become a two-city, August-to-September experience, it’s still hard to wrap your brain around the fact that, come next weekend, we’ll be watching live post-season NHL hockey from lunchtime until midnight.

As a range of sports continue to make long-awaited returns, we figured it might be useful to have cheat sheet for a summer hockey session that figures to be unlike anything we’ve seen. In case you’ve forgotten — because you’ve got nothing else on your mind these days, right? — here are some need-to-knows about this puck extravaganza happening in Toronto and Edmonton.

Who is in and how are we doing this?

The NHL ranked teams by points percentage and put the top 12 from each conference into the post-season. The best four teams in the East and West will play one game against each of the other three clubs to receive a bye in its conference to determine seeds No. 1 to No. 4 for the main draw of the playoffs. Those games will be decided by the usual regular season three-on-three overtime and shootout rules if necessary, and any ties in the round-robin standings will be broken by teams’ regular-season points percentage.

Teams five through 12 on each side are playing a preliminary round featuring best-of-five series, with the No. 5 seed facing No. 12, No. 6 squaring off against No. 11 and so on. These games will not use three-on-three overtime or shootouts; extra time is 20-minute periods until we have a winner.

Collectively, these games are being put under the umbrella of 2020 Stanley Cup Qualifiers. All player statistics from these contests will count toward playoff totals. So if you score three goals during the Qualifiers and 10 more in the playoffs, for the purpose of the history books, your total for the 2020 post-season is 13.

continued