2020-21 NCHC Season

This is the 2020-21 National Collegiate Hockey Conference men's ice hockey season. This is the league's 8th season.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the league is beginning play in a pod in Omaha, Nebraska. The plan is for the teams to play ten games each over three weeks against the teams playing teams in the other pod with Miami, Minnesota-Duluth, St. Cloud St., and Western Michigan making up the east pod and Colorado College, Denver, North Dakota, and Omaha making up the west pod. The teams will end up playing each of the other members of the conference home and home over the rest of the season to make up the schedule.

Membership changes

 * none

Conference Tournament
The 2021 NCHC Tournament was the eighth tournament in league history. Typically the tournament is scheduled across two separate weekends in mid-march with quarterfinal games hosted on campus locations, while the final four games are played at the Xcel Energy Center in Saint Paul, Minnesota. However, on February 8, 2021, NCHC announced that the tournament would be played entirely in Grand Forks.

Format
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, changes to the traditional tournament format were made for this season. All games will be single-elimination as opposed to a best-of-three games quarterfinals, and no third-place game will occur. All eight conference teams participate in the tournament. Teams are seeded No. 1 through No. 8 according to their final conference standing, with a tiebreaker system used to seed teams with an identical number of points accumulated. The top four seeded teams each earn home ice and host one of the lower seeded teams.

The winners of the quarterfinals round series will advance to the NCHC Frozen Faceoff. Teams are re-seeded No. 1 through No. 4 according to the final regular season conference standings.

Bracket
Teams are reseeded for the Semifinals

* denotes overtime periods