Could you schedule the NHL?

Start with the shape of the thing. Thirty-two clubs each play a full season, and every one of those games has to land on a specific night, in a specific building, in a league that runs from the end of September to the middle of April.

There is a trap in that arithmetic, and it is worth pausing on because it is the first thing that tells you a schedule is not a list. If you add up what every club plays, you get 2,688. But a game is not something one team has. It is something two teams share. Edmonton hosting Vancouver is one game that appears on two calendars. Count the calendars and you double everything. Divide by two and you get the real number.

That is the job, stated once: find 1,344 slots. It sounds almost manageable written down like that, which is the last time it will.

The NHL is too big to feel, so here is a league small enough to hold in your head. Four clubs, four buildings, two weeks. Everybody plays everybody home and away, which is twelve games. Fourteen days to put them in.

Before anybody asks for anything, this is easy. Twelve games, fourteen days, no rules. Any game could go on any night. The grid below shows that: every square is a night a game could happen.

Then reality arrives, one request at a time. Turn them on in order and watch the grid. Nothing here is decorative, and nothing is random. A square goes dark because a named rule rejected that exact game on that exact night, and the rule will tell you why if you ask it.

Two of these are different in kind from the others, and the distinction matters more than anything else on this page. A building that is already hosting a concert is not a preference. Neither is a club whose players are sitting exams. Those are walls. You do not negotiate with them, you schedule around them. A club’s wish for a Saturday home date is a genuine, reasonable, revenue-shaped request, and it is still just a request. A preference never gets to knock down a wall.

That is the lesson, and it is why scheduling is hard. You started with 168 open nights and you have 17 left. Nothing in that grid was unreasonable. The concert was booked a year ago. The exams were set by a school board. The rest rule exists so that nobody gets hurt. Every single request, taken by itself, is fine. They become a problem only when they all have to be true at the same time.

And notice what happened to the calendar. At the start, a night was just a night. By the end, some nights can only hold one particular game, and some games only fit on one particular night. The dates stopped being interchangeable. That is the moment a scheduling problem becomes a scheduling problem.

Stay in the small league, because now we can do something with it that is impossible with the real one. There are exactly 223,084 ways to schedule those twelve games without breaking a single hard rule. Not an estimate. We checked all of them.

That means we can ask an honest question and get an honest answer. Every club wants a Saturday home game. There are two Saturdays. What does it cost to give them out?

This is the part that gets flattened when people talk about scheduling, and I want to be careful about it. Not every improvement is a trade. Plenty of the time a schedule is simply worse than it needs to be, and you can fix it for free. The first two Saturdays here are exactly that. But the last one is not, and no amount of cleverness makes it free, because we checked every possibility and the cheapest version still costs three turnarounds.

One more result from the same search, and it cuts the other way. Summit Pines is four hours from everybody else and would rather make one trip down the valley than two. That request costs nothing at all, at every level of Saturday generosity. Honouring it is free. If you assumed every request must cost something, you would have traded away something real to buy a thing you could have had for nothing.

Everything up to here has been a model. This is not. What follows is the published 2026-27 NHL regular season, every game of it, measured with the definitions set out at the bottom of this page. Pick a club and see the shape of its year.

One thing to keep in mind as you read: a number being high or low is not the same as a number being unfair. Some of what you are about to see is geography. Some of it is arithmetic. A little of it is worth knowing.

Go back to your club for a second and look at the shape of it. Long homestands, or a constant flip between home and away. A stretch of road games that looks punishing. That shape is the thing fans argue about, and it is the thing most people get wrong, because they are judging the pattern without asking what sport it is in or where the club has to go.

Take a run of five home games followed by five on the road. In hockey that is a real burden: five straight nights away in five different cities, with everything that follows from it. In baseball the same shape is completely unremarkable. Baseball is built out of series, so clubs arrive in a city, play three or four games, and move on once. A ten-game homestand in baseball is normal and, if anything, popular. Identical pattern, different sport, opposite verdict.

Now flip it. Home, away, home, away, right through the season. That looks lovely and balanced on paper, and whether it is depends entirely on a map. If your away games are an hour down the road, alternating is the best thing that can happen to you: you sleep at home most nights. If your away games are three time zones away, alternating is a punishment, because every one of those flips is a flight.

The other thing that shapes a season is what else the arena is doing. The clearest case in this schedule is the New York Rangers, who share Madison Square Garden with the Knicks and with one of the busiest concert calendars anywhere in the world. Three sets of tenants, one building, and basketball and hockey overlap almost completely through the winter.

You can see what that does. The Rangers have one of the choppiest schedules in the league, the shortest longest-homestand of any club, and nearly the fewest Saturday home dates of anybody. Read those three numbers cold and it looks like a club that got a raw deal.

It almost certainly is not. Look at the other half of the picture: the Rangers’ typical road trip is one of the shortest in the league, because half their opponents are a short flight or a bus ride away. A choppy schedule is cheap for them in a way it would be ruinous for Vancouver. The building forces the shape, and the geography makes the shape affordable. That is not a mistake anybody made. It is a tradeoff somebody looked at and accepted, and then accepted again the next year, and the year after that.