NHL season will finish with 24-team playoff bracket confined to 2 'hub cities'

The NHL has a plan for finishing its 2019-20 season — if it's ever allowed to resume play.

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman announced Tuesday that the league would not be resuming the regular season play it suspended in early March amid the COVID-19 pandemic. And while the NHL hasn't decided to resume play just yet, if and when that happens, it'll immediately proceed to a modified playoff schedule.

Bettman broke down the NHL's return-to-play plan into four phases, with the league remaining in phase one, or a "pause and self-quarantine," as of Tuesday. Phase two, or noncontact workouts for small groups of players at team facilities, are expected to start in early June, and phase three, or formal training camps, will begin "no earlier than the first half of July," Bettman said.

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If teams remain safe after all of that, a 24-team playoff bracket will immediately begin with the Eastern and Western conference teams confined to play in two "hub cities." Each tournament will begin with the top four teams in each conference — decided based on their win percentage as of the NHL shutdown — playing for top seeding. The eight teams with the next highest winning percentages will then play qualifying best-of-five-game rounds that'll decide whether they will advance and play the top four seeds. Another two rounds will follow with series lengths yet to be determined, and then the eventual winners from each conference will play a best-of-seven series to win the Stanley Cup.

The eventual playoffs will also reshuffle the NHL draft lottery, with seven losers of the qualifying rounds getting draws after the six teams that didn't make the playoffs. Find a breakdown of what teams will play and how the tournament will work at NBC Sports.