I’m not sure how late to the party you have to be to still be confused about the format here.
Teams that are “in” will play a largely meaningless round robin tournament while the “play in” round is taking place. It will be used to determine seeding, but considering what a crapshoot this is, with teams who weren’t even in possibly being in and no one having played in months, plus no home ice advantage, I would imagine seeding amounts to diddly in the grand scheme of things.
My only thought on the matter is why would a Bergeron or Pastrnak or Ovechkin risk injury in the round robin games by treating them as anything other than preseason? Yeah you wanna get up to game speed, but not at the risk of missing the actual playoffs. Can’t imagine these games will have much intensity with virtually nothing on the line. The play in round, on the other hand is essentially round one of the playoffs for these teams so they’ll be playing for their post season life and their will be plenty of intensity. I would not be surprised to see none of the top seeded teams make it to the conference finals because they’re going to be playing meaningless preseason style hockey before running into a team that not only played a full round of playoff hockey but now has the hype and momentum of winning a meaningful series and advancing. I’m anticipating this will be the year of the wild cards.