Power Ranking Every NHL Division Heading Into the 2026-27 Season

Thirty-two days from now, it's a moot point.

That's the day on which pucks drop in five NHL cities to kick off the league's 2026-27 regular season, which will stretch to 84 games for the first time since 1993-94.

The defending champion Carolina Hurricanes will raise a banner that afternoon against the team that won the previous two Stanley Cups, the Florida Panthers.

The Hurricanes accrued 113 points in 2025-26 and lapped the field in the Metropolitan Division, then got even hotter in the postseason and eliminated Ottawa, Philadelphia, Montreal and Vegas—going 16-3 in the playoffs on the way to their first championship victory since 2006.

Having the champs is a huge competitive feather in the cap of the Metropolitan, but B/R's hockey team looked at the four divisions from top to bottom in assembling a preseason power ranking of the divisions as the schedule's start draws near.

Take a look at what we came up with and drop a thought in the app comments.

That's the phrase no less of an authority than Connor McDavid used when describing how his Edmonton Oilers were " fortunate " to play in the Pacific when chasing a playoff berth down the stretch in 2025-26.

Edmonton finished 14th overall in the league with 41 wins and 93 points but copped second in the Pacific, just two points off the pace of the first-place Vegas Golden Knights, who finished tied for 12th overall with a team (Washington) that didn't even qualify for the Eastern Conference playoffs.

"It's a bit of a pillow fight right now," McDavid said.

Indeed, in spite of the presence of McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Macklin Celebrini and other talented youngsters in both San Jose and Anaheim, truer words were never spoken.

If you're looking for a top-heavy group, nobody beats the Central.

The "other" Western Conference division had the Presidents' Trophy winners from Colorado and the third-place overall team in Dallas, not to mention the No. 7 finisher in Minnesota.

Those three teams combined for 151 wins and captured nearly 68.5 percent of possible standings points, but we can't consider ourselves responsible journalists unless we look at the rest of the division—namely Utah, St. Louis, Nashville, Winnipeg and Chicago—only one of which (Utah) made the playoffs while the other four finished among the league's bottom 11 out of 32.

Maybe Nathan MacKinnon is the best player in the league. Certainly you can argue that either Quinn Hughes or Cale Makar is its best defenseman.

But put the Avalanche and Wild together with the rest of the flotsam and jetsam and the collective quickly goes downhill.

As we mentioned earlier, all the Metropolitan Division really has to do in a competition like this is pull on a Carolina Hurricanes sweater and yell, "Scoreboard!"

But let's face it, Carolina's march to the 2026 Stanley Cup was as much a product of an obscenely hot playoff run—8-0 through two rounds, 12-1 through three—as it was a dominant blitz through the regular season.

None of the other seven teams in the division got to 100 points and five of them missed the playoffs entirely. So if you want to contend that the Metropolitan belongs no better than equal to or below the Central, we'll listen.

But when it comes to hockey lists, possession of the Cup is nine-tenths of the law.

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OK, we'll say it: Not only will more than one team from the Atlantic amass more than 100 points across 84 games from September to April, but we'll go a step further and say at least one Atlantic team (if not more) will hoist a Cup in the next few seasons.

And it's certainly no stretch to say it'll be next spring.

Lest anyone forget, the Atlantic had four 100-point teams and five playoff participants in its ranks last season, and that doesn't even include the injury-ravaged Panthers—who missed out on the 2025-26 postseason party after having gone the distance to win consecutive Cups in 2023-24 and 2024-25.

Think they won't be back in the mix again this season? Think again.

The folks at DraftKings have already installed Florida alongside Carolina as the top pick to hoist the chalice in 2027 at +650 apiece , and two of the other top-10 picks—Tampa Bay at +1200 and Montreal at +2200—are reppin' the Atlantic, too.