The NHL scheduled four Game Ones for Sunday. The Los Angeles Kings open the round at 3 p.m. Eastern at Ball Arena in Denver against the Colorado Avalanche. The Montreal Canadiens play the Tampa Bay Lightning at 5:45 p.m. in Tampa. The Boston Bruins play the Buffalo Sabres at 7:30 p.m. at KeyBank Center. The Utah Mammoth play the Vegas Golden Knights at 10 p.m. at T-Mobile Arena. [1] That is nine hours of continuous first-round hockey, four arenas, two networks, and the kind of bill a concert promoter would assemble if a concert promoter ran the Stanley Cup.

Saturday's opener was Carolina's 2-0 win over Ottawa at PNC Arena, Frederik Andersen stopping all 22 shots. [2] The three other Saturday games — Philadelphia at Pittsburgh, Minnesota at Dallas, and the East's early Game Ones — set the tone. Sunday carries the Western Conference's marquee matchup, the Atlantic's long-awaited Montreal return, and a franchise playoff debut that did not exist eighteen months ago.

Kings-Avalanche at 3 is the matinee with the heaviest résumé. Colorado finished 55-16-11 with 121 points, won the Presidents' Trophy, and carry Nathan MacKinnon's 53-goal regular season into Game One against a Kings team that earned the second wild card at 35-27-20. [3] The two franchises met in the 2001 and 2002 playoffs, more than two decades ago; Colorado won both in seven. Adrian Kempe led the Kings in scoring with 36 goals and 37 assists. The series projects as a test of whether Los Angeles can play under the Avalanche's pace at Ball Arena for two road games, or whether the Avalanche close it out inside six.

Montreal-Tampa Bay at 5:45 is the story the Atlantic has been waiting for. The Canadiens are back in the playoffs for the first time since the 2021 Stanley Cup Final, which Tampa Bay won in five games. [4] Montreal (48-24-10) earned the third seed. Tampa Bay (50-26-6) held second with 106 points. Nikita Kucherov led the league's scorers with 130 points — 44 goals, 86 assists. Montreal captain Nick Suzuki, with 101 points, is the fifth player in franchise history to reach triple digits. The two teams split their four regular-season meetings; Montreal won the last two. The subtext is that a fan base that has watched its team grow up — Cole Caufield, Juraj Slafkovsky, Ivan Demidov, Lane Hutson — now has to watch them grow up in April hockey.

Boston-Buffalo at 7:30 is the Atlantic's odd couple. The Sabres finished first in the division at 50-23-9, 109 points, their best regular season in more than a decade. [5] Tage Thompson scored 40 goals. Boston, at 45-27-10, took the first wild card through a late-season push against the same Flyers team that swept them the last time they met in the postseason. David Pastrnak's 71 assists carried a team that has learned to play without the scoring depth of its 2022-24 rosters. The consensus pick in previews is Buffalo, which has not won a playoff series since 2007. The kind of storyline that rewrites itself once a series starts.

Mammoth-Golden Knights at 10 is the night's closer — the first playoff game in Utah Mammoth franchise history, against a team that has reached the Stanley Cup Final twice and won it once since entering the league in 2017. Vegas won the Pacific Division at 39-26-17 in part by firing Bruce Cassidy, the coach who had raised the Cup in 2023, and replacing him with John Tortorella on March 29. [1] Utah won two of three regular-season meetings, including a 4-0 shutout in Las Vegas on March 19 in which Karel Vejmelka made 28 saves. Clayton Keller, Utah's captain, led the team with 88 points. He is, per the NHL, only the third American in the modern era to captain a franchise to its first-ever playoff berth — a distinction the Mammoth's branding departments have been deploying since Thursday night.

The scheduling is a product of Western Conference time zones meeting East Coast network windows, but the effect is a Sunday that reads like one long act. ESPN carries the late game; TNT carries three of four; SN, CBC, and TVAS carry the Canadian feeds. The Canadiens return, the Kings-Avalanche weight, the Sabres' first playoff run in a generation, the Mammoth's franchise first — four different registers of what a first round can mean, all compressed into one window. The schedule is the story.

-- AMARA OKONKWO, Lagos