Stanley Cup contender tiers: Where do all 32 NHL teams fit in? - ESPN

The seasons are changing and the days are getting shorter. That means hockey season is nearly upon us — and we should be in for a fascinating one in 2026-27.

Going into last season, we wrote that something had to give: Either we would see more of the same after two consecutive Florida Panthers-Edmonton Oilers Stanley Cup Finals, or someone new was finally going to get a chance to break through. Little did we know just how far things would swing away from the familiar.

Not only did the two-time defending Cup winner (and three-time defending East champ) Panthers not win again, but they didn't even make the playoffs amid an injury-wrecked campaign. Meanwhile, the Oilers barely made it any further, losing in the first round to the upstart Anaheim Ducks.

But if we thought the Carolina Hurricanes' long-awaited title after seven previously fruitless playoff trips signals the start of a new NHL era, well, not so fast. The Panthers and Oilers are still here, along with the 2023 champion Vegas Golden Knights — whom Carolina beat for the Cup — plus the Colorado Avalanche and Tampa Bay Lightning among recent champs.

If anything, the league now enters another new season with an unusual mix of teams trying to prove last year was no fluke, familiar heavyweights trying to climb back to the top, and young squads trying to crash the party ahead of schedule.

To help handicap the race before opening night on Tuesday, let's look at my aggregated market-forecast tracker, which normalizes and averages together the odds from multiple different sportsbooks and prediction markets to produce a consensus estimate of each team's chances at the playoffs and the Stanley Cup. Using those numbers, we can sort all 32 teams into six tiers — from the