Basically, I don’t understand how this fits in the schedule if you don’t know which teams are going to qualify beforehand and we already have an 82 game schedule planned from the beginning of the season. Do they cancel a game that was originally planned for later in the season between the teams that play in the knockout? I haven’t been able to find a good answer to this by reading through the rules they just keep repeating that it doesn’t add games to the overall regular season
We don’t already have an 82 game schedule.
Knockout round teams games count, all others will have 1 or 2 (depending if they don’t qualify, or don’t make the semis) games scheduled from the remaining teams, favoring teams that they only play 2 or 3 times (avoiding the possibility of playing a team 5x)
You know this is all free info on the Internet.