NHL conference finals
cup playoffs
The National Hockey League (NHL) conference finals are the Eastern Conference and Western Conference championship series of the NHL. The conference finals are each a best-of-seven series, and comprise the third round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. The two series are played in mid-to-late May (early June in 1995 and 2013, due to labour disputes that delayed the start of the season and September in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic). The winners of the Eastern and Western Conference finals receive the Prince of Wales Trophy and Clarence S. Campbell Bowl, respectively, and advance to face each other in the Stanley Cup Final.
History
Before the 1967–68 season, the NHL was made up only of a single division. From the 1967–68 season through the 1973–74 season, the NHL was made up of two divisions (as opposed to conferences), the East Division and the West Division.
Following the 1973–74 season, the NHL again realigned. The East and West Divisions were renamed the Prince of Wales and Clarence Campbell Conferences, respectively. At the time, the new conferences and divisions had little to do with North American geography and geographical references were removed. Furthermore, all playoff teams were seeded regardless of conference.
Beginning in the 1981–82 season, the conferences and the playoffs were realigned.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “NHL conference finals” is cup playoffs. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through conference, finals and playoffs, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6378285. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1995, 2013, 2020 and 1967.
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This entry incorporates text from “NHL conference finals” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.