How Does Overtime Work in the NHL? Regular Season vs. Playoffs Explained

The Milan Olympics put hockey in front of tens of millions of new fans in February. A lot of them came away with the same confusion: why did some overtime games end in a shootout when the NHL playoffs clearly don’t work that way? And what’s all this about three-on-three?

Here’s the clean explanation, no confusion left on the table.

Regular Season Overtime: Five Minutes of Chaos

If an NHL regular season game is tied after 60 minutes, the teams play a five-minute sudden-death overtime period at three-on-three. Three skaters per side, no goaltender changes, first team to score wins.

The three-on-three format was adopted by the NHL in June 2015 for the 2015-16 season, and it changed the overtime experience immediately. Pull three skaters off each side and the ice opens up in ways that the five-on-five game simply doesn’t allow. Odd-man rushes are constant. Goalies are exposed. Games that looked like they were grinding toward a shootout suddenly explode. The five-minute window produces goals at a substantially higher rate than any five minutes of regulation, which was exactly the point.

One important wrinkle: if a player takes a penalty during three-on-three overtime, the team that committed the infraction drops to two skaters while the opposing team adds one, creating a four-on-two situation. That’s essentially a guaranteed goal if the power play unit is competent. Coaches treat penalties in overtime like catastrophes, which means players are more disciplined than at almost any other point in the game.

If neither team scores in five minutes, it goes to a shootout.

The Shootout: Hockey’s Most Debated Format

Three shooters per side, alternating attempts. Each skater skates in alone from center ice and tries to beat the goaltender one-on-one. Best-of-three wins. If it’s tied after three rounds, it continues in sudden-death format — one shot per team per round — until one team scores and the other doesn’t.

The team that wins in overtime or the shootout earns two points in the standings. The team that loses earns one point for forcing the game past regulation. That one-point consolation — called the loser point, or sometimes sarcastically the “garbage point” — is a persistent source of debate among fans and analysts. It inflates the standings by rewarding teams for not losing in regulation, which creates distortions late in the season when a handful of loser points can separate a playoff team from a team watching from home.

The 2025-26 season has produced a notable trend on the overtime front. Through 850 games, 27.3% of games went past regulation — a pace that, if maintained, would be the highest rate since the shootout was introduced in 2005-06. The three-on-three format is so open that teams are increasingly content to trade defense for offense in late regulation, knowing that a tie earns the loser point and gives them a live chance in OT. It’s a rational strategy. It also makes late-game hockey less decisive than purists would like.

Playoff Overtime: The Real Thing

Forget everything above. The playoffs are different.

When an NHL playoff game is tied after regulation, the teams play a full 20-minute sudden-death overtime period at five-on-five. No three-on-three. No shootout. No loser points. One team scores or the game keeps going.

If the first overtime period ends scoreless, there’s a 15-minute intermission — slightly shorter than the standard 17-minute intermission during regulation — and the teams go back out for a second overtime period. Same format. Full strength. Sudden death. If that one’s scoreless, another intermission, another period. This continues indefinitely until someone scores.

The longest game in NHL playoff history went six overtimes. On March 24, 1936, the Detroit Red Wings defeated the Montreal Maroons 1-0 in a game that lasted 116 minutes and 30 seconds of actual play time, a total of 176 minutes and 30 seconds on the clock. That record has stood for 90 years. It’s unlikely to fall — not because the format makes multiple-overtime games rare, but because a six-overtime game requires a specific combination of elite goaltending on both sides, bad luck on both sides, and coaches who know how to manage fatigue across an entire extra game’s worth of hockey.

Why the Difference Exists

The regular season uses three-on-three and the shootout because 82 games is an enormous schedule to manage, and the league needs decisive outcomes without destroying players with endless overtime periods in October or November. A shootout in game 14 of the season is a reasonable trade-off for avoiding situations where players skate 60 extra minutes before a back-to-back. Teams also need the points. The format is designed for pace and clarity.

The playoffs use full 5-on-5 sudden death because playoff hockey is supposed to test the complete game. Shootouts determine individual skill in isolation — they’re a skills competition tacked onto a team sport. The playoffs are about team structure, depth, goaltending, defensive systems, and the ability to sustain performance under maximum pressure for weeks on end. Deciding a Stanley Cup series on a shootout would be antithetical to everything the playoffs represent. Every team that has ever been eliminated from the Stanley Cup playoffs was beaten by a goal at full strength, in real game conditions. That standard matters.

What It Looks Like in Practice

In a regular season overtime, the play is frenetic from the drop of the puck. Three-on-three creates a track meet. Coaches throw out their best offensive players because the object is to score in five minutes, not to manage a 40-minute grind. You’ll see more two-on-one rushes in five minutes of regular season overtime than in an entire period of regulation.

In playoff overtime, the game tightens. Coaches are managing shifts more carefully — players take shorter turns to stay fresher for later periods. Defensive structure comes back. Mistakes are punished more severely because there’s no loser point to cushion the blow. A bad line change or a soft turnover in your own zone in the third overtime of Game 7 is a career-defining moment, and everyone on the ice knows it. The atmosphere in playoff overtime is unlike anything else in professional sports.

Connor McDavid, who has played in his share of deep playoff runs with the Edmonton Oilers, has described the experience as the moments he plays hockey for. When you watch him in playoff overtime, you believe it.

The Penalty Situation

One more piece worth understanding: in regular season overtime, penalties are treated as described above — the shorthanded team drops to two, the other plays four. In playoff overtime, penalties work exactly as they do in regulation. The shorthanded team plays down a man. The power play operates for the full penalty duration. If the power play team scores, the game ends immediately and the penalized player is released regardless of time remaining.

Taking a penalty in playoff overtime is the kind of mistake that follows a player through the offseason. That pressure is by design.

The Bottom Line

Regular season overtime is a fast, entertaining format that prioritizes resolution and serves the 82-game schedule. Playoff overtime is the sport at its most demanding, a test of everything a team has built all year with nothing held back and no safety net. Both matter. Only one of them is the reason hockey fans don’t sleep in April.

Which format do you prefer — the wide-open chaos of three-on-three, or the grinding tension of playoff sudden death? Sound off in the comments or hit us on social.