All NHL regular-season games tied after 60 minutes of play ended as ties beginning on November 21, 1942, when overtime (an extra period of 10 minutes duration) was discontinued owing to wartime limitations, and lasting until the 1983–84 season. On June 23, 1983, the NHL instituted a five-minute regular-season overtime period. Since then, all games have been decided by a shootout following a tie; if the score remains tied after three rounds, an additional round is played.
In the NHL, how does overtime work? If a game is tied after 60 minutes of regulation play during the regular season, an overtime session of 5 minutes will be added. If a player scores during this time, the game is ended and his team is declared the winner. If not, the clock resumes with a new first period at 0:00.
Over time, some teams seem to be better at overtime than others. Here are the results of games played between 1992 and 2018. The data comes from Lions Database.
The chart shows that over time, the winning percentage of both teams tends to even out, so it’s not clear who has an advantage in overtime. However, there are some trends worth mentioning:
If you take away the Detroit Red Wings’ overtime victories, they would have lost more than they won over the course of the study period. Conversely, if you include their victories in overtime, they would have been closer to being even.
Overtime wins tend to come down to goal scoring. If you look at just the regular season games included in the study, the team that scores first tends to win (55 percent). But when we include all the games over the course of the study period, we see that goes up to about 60 percent.
The top three longest overtime games in NHL Playoff history are as follows:
Extra periods in the Stanley Cup playoffs and all tiebreaker games are played like normal periods—teams are at full strength (five skaters, barring penalties), there is no shootout, and each overtime session is 20 minutes long with complete intermissions in between. If scores are still tied after five minutes of overtime, the first team to score wins. If neither team scores during the last 5 minutes of overtime, the game is declared a tie.
This procedure was adopted in 2005 by the NHL in response to concerns about physical play and injuries occurring in some overtime sessions. Prior to this change, if there were ties in the series, a double-overtime series would be played, with a penalty shot used if necessary. The double-overtime limit was then extended to three periods in 2008.
There have been calls from several hockey commentators for several years now to simply remove the tiebreaker rule and go back to using regular periods in playoff overtime. The reason given is that there are enough rules in place to prevent overtimes from happening too often during the course of a game; adding an extra period would just make it easier for teams to avoid playing until the end. However, others argue that removing the tiebreaker would lead to more exciting games as well as less physical play in general.
During the regular season, the NHL’s extra session is five minutes of sudden death hockey. That is, if a team scores first, they will win. The ice surface may be spruced up before overtime, but there is no genuine intermission. There are simply more shots on goal in overtime.
In the playoffs, though, things change. If a series is tied after five games, then each team will get one chance over two hours to score a goal. The winner is determined by the last player to score wins the game and the series. This system was adopted for the 1994 playoffs after the Detroit Red Wings and New York Rangers had ties at 3-3 after four games. Before that time, if the series was still tied after four games, they went to an instant replay process where officials would review whether the puck crossed the line into the net with a certain amount of time left on the clock. If it did, the call would be upheld; if it didn’t, the game would go back to being three minutes long with a power play for each team.
There have been calls to end the playoff series early, but no one has come up with a good solution. Some ideas include having a best-of-three series or eliminating the third period completely. At this point, the NHL decides not to rush into anything just because we know how much people love their hockey.
Overtime periods are extra periods that occur after the third regulation period of a game in which normal hockey rules apply. Although full-length overtime periods were once played, today’s overtimes are golden goal (a type of sudden death), which means that the game finishes instantly when a player scores a goal. The only way to end an overtime game is with a victory by one team or the other.
In fact, the term “overtime” comes from old English meaning “outside the time”. When ice hockey was developed in Canada in the early 20th century, it was decided that additional time would be added on after each period to allow for momentum and excitement to continue without stopping the game. The first overtime period in history occurred on March 5, 1924, when Ottawa beat Montreal 6-5. Each team had one final chance to score a goal before turning off their lights; if no goals were scored, an official from the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association would call “over”, at which point the game would be over and a winner would be declared.
As golden goals are used more often today, the term “overtime” has come to mean any period during which there is no regular time limit. In other words, if a game goes into double overtime, then both teams have been given two chances to score a goal and the first team to do so wins.
Copyright © 2020 - 2026 Sportsmanist Inc.
