NHL Playoff Pool – Playoff Hockey Pool Ideas

Although the NHL regular season comes to an end in early spring, your fantasy hockey addictions live on, and you are actively seeking a NHL playoff office pool to heighten your hockey interests through the postseason.
Am I Right? If so, read on.

Many different formats can be used for a NHL Playoff Pool, but some are quite superior to others. Below is a shortlist of different format options, sorted by ease of maintenance, and some tips for managing your playoff hockey pools so that your office buddies are sure to experience maximum enjoyment.

#1 – Office Pool Draft for the Stanley Cup Champion

This one is simple. You randomly draw names out of a hat to determine the order in which each participant chooses a Stanley Cup champion. If you select the champion, you get the spoils (i.e. Johnny two cubes down has to fetch your coffee each morning for two months).

#2 – Round by Round Playoff Pool Picks

If you've ever participated in a March Madness office pool, you are familiar with the concept of filling out a bracket with your playoff pool picks. In this format you pick teams that you believe will advance round by round.

Each person in your pool predicts who will advance to which round before the playoffs begin. Each round is worth more points (refer to the grid below). Also below is a screenshot of the Excel template for my picks from 2012; using the points template and my picks you can see that I ended up with 140 points total, which unfortunately was not enough claim victory over the seven others that participated in the playoff office pool.





** Highlighted in orange are the correct winners selected each round.

#3 – Draft All Potential Outcomes Each Round

For this pool you use the common snake draft to choose the winner and the number of games in which they'll win. Using 2012 as an example again, below is a screenshot of the squares that you fill in with your initials where you think the series will end.

If you are certain the Penguins are going to win, you might fill in Penguins in 4, 5, 6, and 7. That is, of course, if no one else drafts those outcomes before you. When drafting, you could limit each participant to take only one outcome per time or let them choose two, three, or four in a row. Each correct outcome is worth 1 point towards your total. Whoever has the most points at the end of the playoffs wins. You could also weight the later rounds to be worth more points.

#4 - 8 x 8 Grid Box

This one was recently shared by Bernard and sounds extremely fun, and very similar to our football squares format. He calls out specific money amounts below but those can be removed or lessened as you see fit.

$25 a box to get into the pool. First come first serve picking your box numbers 1 – 64.

The 8 Eastern Conference team finalists are drawn randomly (Names out of a hat) across the top as Columns.

The 8 Western Conference team finalists are drawn randomly (Names out of a hat) across the left side as Rows.

5 Ways to make money.

The box with the Stanley Cup finalists gets. $500

The box with the losing Conference Finalists (East and West) gets $200

Any of the 7 remaining boxes (Rows or Columns depending on winner) of the Stanly Cup Champion gets $100 (Stanley Cup Finalist Box winner is excluded – they already got $500).

The Box with the first Eastern Conference team out of the playoffs and first Western Conference team out of the playoffs gets $100.

The box with the 8th Team from the Eastern Conference and the 8th Team from the Western Conference to make the playoffs gets $100.

If you know of other entertaining NHL playoff pools please leave a comment below. Easy Office Pools posts reminders to our Facebook page so be sure to like us to receive reminders in the future for easy, fun, and creative office pools.

Cheers!

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