A handy guide to the play-offs

We’ve reached this time of the season which is peak excitement and great hockey all the way to the end of the season.

Since it’s been three years since the Premier Sports Elite League had a play-off competition, there are some people may not be quite au fait with the format so we decided to tell you how it all works.

You would have seen plenty of talk from coach Malcolm Cameron and the players about the need to reach the playoffs, so here is what it’s all about.

Knockout Stages

The teams placed 1-8 at the end of the Regular Season Championship take part in the Quarter-Finals of the Premier Sports Elite League Playoffs in a two-legged aggregate score series of games with the overall winner of each series progressing further in the competition.

In the event of a tie after the two legs, there will be a 10-minute overtime period of three-on-three, but if no winner is still determined after that, then the tie will go to penalty shots.

The two legs of all ties will be played over the course of this weekend.

Seedings for the 2022 Playoffs will be based on final league standings at the conclusion of the 2021/22 regular season. The Elite League winners will be seeded #1 for the playoffs, the league runners-up #2 and so on down to #8.

The first seed (Belfast Giants) play the eighth (Coventry Blaze) seed, second (Sheffield Steelers) versus seventh (Dundee Stars), third (Cardiff Devils) versus sixth (Glasgow Clan) and fourth (Nottingham Panthers) against fifth (Guildford Flames).

The higher seed in each quarter final will get the choice of when they play their home leg.

Play-off Finals Weekend – POFW

The Play-off Finals Weekend takes place at the end of the season, this year on Saturday, April 30th and Sunday, May 1st, at Motorpoint Arena, Nottingham, with the Semi-Finals taking place on the Saturday and the third versus fourth-placed match and Grand Final on the Sunday.

All games played at POFW are standalone games with the two winning teams progressing to the Grand Final on the Sunday and the two losing teams to participate in the third-fourth place match.

Seedings for the semi-final and final will be determined by the original quarter-final ranking, so the highest-placed team left in the playoffs will be ranked as the highest seed.

The highest seed will play the lowest seed in the first semi-final, with the remaining seeds playing in the second semi-final.

The highest seeded team in each game will have the home advantage.

Tickets for this year’s event can be purchased from the Motorpoint Arena website.

Clan and the play-offs – A potted history

Since Clan joined the Elite League in 2010, they’ve only failed to finish in the top eight once and ended the season without the play-offs to look forward to, in 2018.

However the quarter final stage tends to be where the road ends, having gone out to Nottingham Panthers (2011, 2012), Cardiff Devils (2013), Hull Stingrays (2015), Fife Flyers (2016), Dundee Stars (2017) and Guildford Flames (2019) at this stage.

They did reach the final four weekend in 2014 – the first Scottish team to do so (24 hours before Fife Flyers also joined the party that year) – defeating the Panthers over two legs and winning the second game at home in front of a brilliant crowd that night.

A 4-0 away leg win was followed up with a 5-1 home win and Clan, under Ryan Finnerty were going to be there for the first time in their history.

The semi final was a tight affair as Sheffield Steelers edged the contest 3-2, consigning the men in purple to a third place game against Fife Flyers, where Clan won 7-6 in overtime thanks to Ed McGrane’s finish.

So now the stage is set for another weekend of pulsating play-off action and with Cardiff Devils standing in Glasgow’s way, it’s a chance to push for that final piece of silverware and end the season on a massive high.

Photos by Al Goold