PWHL to let top team pick playoff opponent

The Professional Women’s Hockey League is trying out a couple of new ideas in its inaugural season.

The PWHL is experimenting with a playoff format that allows the top seed to choose its opponent and a different concept for determining the order of the draft.

Teams will begin accumulating draft order points from the time they’re eliminated, with the most successful team from that stretch getting the top pick. It’s a plan originally proposed more than a decade ago by statistician Adam Gold.

“Winning is prioritized for playoff positioning — and non-playoff teams have to earn the first-overall draft selection, rather than depend on a lottery or repeated losses to improve their chances of securing the top pick,” PWHL senior VP of hockey operations Jayna Hefford said. “The perfect complement to the PWHL’s standings structure, in which a team earns three points for a regulation victory, is a process that rewards competitiveness, parity and integrity across the league throughout the regular season.”

Four of six teams will qualify for the playoffs. The team atop the standings when the regular season is over can choose between the Nos. 3 and 4 seeds to face in the first round, which will feature a pair of five-game series.

“It’s another way to be innovative and creative,” Hefford said on a video call with reporters Wednesday.

The abbreviated regular season for the new pro league, which began Jan. 1, includes each of the teams based in New York, Boston, Minnesota, Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa playing 24 games.