Buckle up, Avalanche fans. If you didn’t think the regular season was long enough, you will get to see more hockey starting in the 2026-27 season as the NHL is adding a pair of contests to the slate for each team.
As reported before but now the NHL has started to put it together, the regular season will begin in late September for 2026-27 and Cup awarded mid June. Pre-season shortened and regular season extended to 84 games.
— Pierre LeBrun (@PierreVLeBrun) September 3, 2025
This change is part of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement that will go into effect on Sept. 16, 2026. The players ratified the CBA in early July and memorialized it in a Memorandum of Understanding. There are plenty of changes in store, such as dress codes and a fix to teams circumventing the salary cap for the playoffs by exploiting the long term injured reserve, but this is one of the tweaks that fans will notice the most.
The NHL season will also kick off much earlier than in the past, with a start date sometime in late September. This would put the league almost an entire month ahead of the NBA and give them no competition on days that the NFL isn’t in action early in the calendar. The Stanley Cup Playoffs would end in mid-June, which is not much different than years past. In the four “normal” seasons since the NHL schedule returned to normalcy after the two COVID-impacted years, the final game of the playoffs has been played on June 17, June 24, June 13 and June 26. The end date will still be what fans are used to.
The preseason will also be shortened to four games, down from the six that have been traditionally played in recent years.
In short, the league is starting earlier and trading two preseason games for two regular season games. How does that impact the Avalanche?
The biggest risk factor here is that there are now two more chances for injuries to occur. For a franchise that has been plagued by the injury bug in the three seasons since it won the Stanley Cup, that’s not a good sign at all. This change will create more wear and tear on the players, and while it might be more spread out, two more games is two more games, no matter how you try and spin it with added time for rest.
At the end of the day, this change is just an opportunity for the NHL and its franchises to make more money with regular season broadcasting revenue and increased ticket sales for these two contests. It will not be in place this season, but rather the following when the agreement goes into effect.
