When the puck drops
Most NHL games start at 7:00 or 7:30 PM local time. On a busy night that means a first wave around 7:00 PM ET, Central and Mountain games an hour or two later, and West Coast games at 10:00 PM ET. Saturday and Sunday add afternoon games, and in Canada Saturday night is built around Hockey Night in Canada. Each game on this page shows its start in your time zone.
The season
From the 2026-27 season each team plays 84 regular-season games, two more than before, under the agreement the league and the players signed in 2025. The season starts in October and ends in April. Sixteen teams reach the playoffs, eight from each conference, and every round of the playoffs is best of seven. The Stanley Cup Final is played in June.
The calendar has a few special dates. The Winter Classic is played outdoors around New Year's Day, Stadium Series games are played outdoors in football or baseball parks, and Global Series games take NHL teams to Europe, where they start in the early afternoon or morning ET. All of them are listed here like any other game.
Where games are shown
In the United States the national games are split between ESPN, ABC and ESPN+ on one side and TNT, truTV and HBO Max on the other, and the rest are shown on each team's regional channel. ESPN+ also streams many out-of-market games. In Canada, Sportsnet holds the national rights and regional channels carry local games.
So a Canadian team's game can have a Sportsnet feed, a regional feed and the American feed of the opponent. Our game pages list up to three of them, best first.
Watching hockey without a cable package
ABC's games are on free broadcast TV, so an antenna covers them, and ESPN+ is the cheapest way into the national package in the US because it also carries a large number of out-of-market games. TNT, truTV and HBO Max share the other national games. Several teams have moved their local games to free over-the-air stations in recent seasons, and others sell a streaming plan through their regional network, so check what your own team does before paying for anything.
In Canada, Sportsnet+ streams the Sportsnet games, and TSN carries regional games for some teams. Away from a screen, every team has a radio call, and the NHL app follows each game with live scores, shots and penalties.
Using this page
The list covers today and the next six days. Games under way go to the top of their day with the score and period when we have them. A finished game stays on the list for a few hours.
Open a game for its stream links. They usually appear in the hour before puck drop. If you get there early and the list is empty, the page is working; the links come closer to the start.
If a stream freezes
Use the next link first. Each one is a separate player, often with a different broadcast. Reloading the player page fixes most short freezes, and closing other video tabs helps on a slow connection. Some players will not load through some VPN locations. The players run on other websites; no video is hosted or relayed by CrackStreams.
Overtime and shootouts
A regular-season game tied after 60 minutes goes to a five-minute overtime with three skaters a side, then a shootout. Playoff games have no shootout: they keep playing 20-minute overtime periods until someone scores, which is why a playoff game can run well past its usual length and stay live on this page for a long time.
