NHL Releases 2025-26 Schedule-a few highlights for the Carolina Hurricanes

The Canes have a few quirks in theirs including a rough end to the season

The last real “tentpole” event for the NHL before we dive deep into the summer abyss is the release of next year’s regular season schedule. In previous seasons the league had decided to release the new schedule closer to the start of Free Agency, but this year the decision was apparently made to wait and let most of the major headlines of Free Agency shake out before they released everything.

As they tend to do, leaks started happening complete with ESPN announcing when their opening night would be—complete with such contending the teams as Chicago and Pittsburgh. Now the rest of the league joins in on the fun.

At first it looked like the Canes were going to just drop the calendars and let that be that.

It appeared to mirror previous seasons where the Hurricanes decided to opt out of the fun of a funny video to go with the schedule drop. League-wide they typically don’t have the same shot as ones from the NFL because you aren’t going to try to cram all 82—about to be 84—games in a short video. Still, they are ways to make some noise and sure enough, it was a bit of a fake out as a few minutes later the Canes dropped this:

No, your device isn’t messed up. For some reason Twitter deleted the video so the Canes had a redo.

So the Canes decided to use Jarvy’s pals one more time while the iron was hot. There’s very little doubt that they’ll make another appearance when the Amazon Prime NHL series debuts later this summer featuring Jarvis, but it’s great to see them one more time.

As far as the actual schedule goes, there are parts that are expected—there’s a long road trip at the start of the season while the State Fair occupies the area next door to the Lenovo Center, that trip is to the west coast, and it’s made up with some longer home stands later in the season. There’s also a two week Olympic Break as those that are participating head to Italy to represent their country for the first time in over a decade.

The unexpected is how the season ends. Of their final 23 games, 15 of them are on the road. Unlike last year, their trips out west aren’t wrapped up early, instead they go out to Utah on April 11th, and their last home game is actually on April 7th against Boston.

As far as the rotation of the season goes, Carolina gets to host Florida twice this time around, and the NHL seemingly wanted to build tension for another meeting down the road in the playoffs by knocking out all three within a month-December 19th, December 22nd, and January 16th. There is good news for Canes fans though—they not only are home both sides of the major holidays—Thanksgiving and Christmas—they even play at home on January 1st at 7 PM against Montreal. With the Winter Classic happening on January 2nd instead of the 1st, the NHL is letting more teams have a game on day where a lot of fans can attend.

Theres another interesting date in January—January 6th. That is when the Dallas Stars come into town and a certain player will make his return to Raleigh. The start time right now is 7 PM, but don’t be surprised if that one is picked up nationally.

Other interesting (new) returns: The Avalanche come back with Martin Necas and Jack Drury on Saturday January 3rd, and Dmitri Orlov will return to Raleigh on December 7th.

If you need the whole schedule in one fell swoop, here’s is one version –

https://media.d3.nhle.com/image/private/t_document/prd/qnc5zrqlku4liohjafft.pdf

With the full schedule out, the national TV partners will dissect it and determine which games will appear on ESPN/ESPN app (remember their whole app process is going to be redone starting in September so there may not be ESPN + so much as just “available on the app/Hulu only”) and which games will appear on TNT. As a Cup contending team they won’t be shut out, it’ll just be interesting to see which games get picked up.