The Professional Women’s Hockey League is taking an innovative approach to its first-ever postseason.
The league announced on Wednesday that the 2024 PWHL playoffs — which begin the week of May 6 — will include the top four teams in the regular season standings. The No. 1 seed will be awarded the opportunity to select its semifinal opponent between the third- or fourth-place teams. The semifinal and final will be a best-of-five series.
The PWHL will also be adopting the Gold Plan for determining its draft order. The concept was first introduced in 2012 by a then-student named Adam Gold.
The idea, essentially, was that the draft order would be determined based on how many points a team earns after being eliminated from the playoffs. The PWHL’s adaptation of the system, the league said in a press release, “rewards team success upon elimination from playoff contention.”
In the PWHL, once a team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, it begins earning “draft order points” in all subsequent games using the league’s standard points system. The team with the most “draft order points” at the end of the regular season will be awarded the first-overall pick in the draft. The second non-playoff team with the most “draft order points” will have the…
