The 2024-25 NHL regular season has certainly been a journey, between the emergence of unexpected Stanley Cup and MVP contenders, an incredible 4 Nations Face-Off, blockbuster trades, big winning streaks and, most recently, Alex Ovechkin breaking Wayne Gretzky’s record for career NHL goals.
But we all know the real hockey season starts April 19 when the puck drops on the Stanley Cup playoffs. With it will come the intensity and rugged play that we’ve come to expect over the years as teams make their quest for the Cup.
Oh, and there will also be pressure. Lots and lots of pressure.
To quantify exactly how much weight each team is under to win the Cup right now, I developed the Urgency Index. In it, every playoff team is graded on a 0-10 scale (relative to other playoff squads) in different categories representing reasons why they need to win ASAP:
— Contender status (based on their Elo rating-based odds to win the Cup)
— Market pressure (based on a combination of fanbase and market size)
— Current Cup drought for the franchise
— Recent playoff frustrations (based on total postseason wins over the past five years without a Cup)
— Average roster age (where older = more pressure)
— Contract urgency (average remaining years for the team’s top three active players by goals above replacement before they hit free agency).
Since some situations imply more urgency to win than others, double weight has been added on the contender status, team age and market pressure categories and half-weight on the average free agent years remaining (since teams can often find a way to extend stars if they need to). Then, the totals have been added up to arrive at this semi-scientific ranking of the top playoff teams that have to win a championship this season — or else.
More: ESPN’s Stanley Cup playoff watch
Jump to a team:
Carolina | Dallas | Edmonton
Los Angeles | Minnesota | Tampa Bay
Toronto | Winnipeg | 8 more teams
The Oilers’ Cup chances have slipped in recent weeks, which caused their contender rating to dip here — for what it’s worth, they’re still tied for fifth in ESPN BET’s odds — but they didn’t need it to rank first on the Urgency Index anyway. This is the oldest playoff roster in the league, trying to win the first titles for two of the game’s greatest players (Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl) in a hockey-obsessed market, not having won a Cup since 1990, and coming fresh off a Game 7 loss in the Finals last season.
Add in that the Oilers need to work out contract extensions soon for McDavid and Evan Bouchard, and Edmonton is the model of a franchise that’s at the peak of its contending era. If not this season, when will they finally win one?
Playoff outlook: As the likely third-place team in the Pacific, Edmonton will get a very familiar first-round foe: the Los Angeles Kings, whom they’ve defeated each of the past three seasons.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that the Oilers are dealing with injuries to McDavid and Draisaitl, and their 46.2% win percentage against above-average Elo teams is well below any other top contender’s mark this season. It would be tough to see another season of McDavid’s prime be derailed at the very end.
The Stars would make this list just for the bold deadline trade that produced Mikko Rantanen from the Carolina Hurricanes, but they solidify their spot by virtue of not making the finals since 2020 despite having knocked on the door so often with this group in recent postseasons. And even if that Cup Final trip is included, the Stars had the third-most playoff wins (45) by any NHL team in a six-season span from 2019 to 2024 without a ring to show for it.
They’re still young — 12th youngest in the league overall, to be exact, and one of the youngest playoff teams — so there’s plenty of runaway ahead for Jake Oettinger, Jason Robertson, Thomas Harley and the rest. (But the latter two of those do need new contracts after 2025-26, and captain Jamie Benn is up this summer.) After a pair of losses in the conference finals, Dallas might not get a better Cup chance than it has right now.
Playoff outlook: Dallas is pursuing Winnipeg for both the top spot in the Central and the No. 1 seed in the West, which matters quite a bit — it means the difference between playing one of the wild-card teams (St. Louis or, most likely, Minnesota) as a heavy first-round favorite, and having to deal with Cale Makar, Nathan MacKinnon and the Colorado Avalanche in Round 1.
The Stars are better than Colorado by metrics such as Elo ratings and Hockey-Reference’s simple rating system (SRS), but the prospect that their run could end right away ratchets up the pressure in Dallas even higher.
When is there ever not crushing pressure on the Leafs to win the Cup? No need to belabor the details here, but Toronto hasn’t seen a championship parade for this team down Bay Street since the spring of 1967 — and mix in the size and avidity of the Toronto market, and these are the kings of both our “Cup drought” and “market pressure” stats.
The only mitigating factors might be that this team is still relatively young, so it will have more chances down the road, and Leafs fans have seen seasons like this go sideways so many times before that they tend to temper their expectations with the hardened cynicism that comes with decades of heartbreak. But make no mistake, with Mitch Marner’s contract situation hanging over the future of the Leafs’ core, there is as much urgency to win now as usual.
Playoff outlook: With what will probably be the No. 2 seed in the East, Toronto is looking at a likely first-round matchup with the wild-card Ottawa Senators. The Leafs ought to be favored on paper, and an uncharacteristic balance between offense and defense might offer this version of the team a higher postseason ceiling than usual.
But who are we kidding? It’s the Leafs. They’re not under pressure to win so much as to outrun the cloud of doom that has followed the franchise everywhere.
As far as best chances to win go, it’s hard to top what Winnipeg is facing this season. While there are still questions about whether it is ready to make a deep postseason run — it has won one playoff round since going to the conference finals in 2018 — the Jets are as poised on paper to win the Cup as any team, with the league’s top SRS (by far) being driven by the league’s best goalie, Connor Hellebuyck.
They might also be underrated by our system for a few reasons. First, for the purposes of their Cup drought, we’re using Hockey-Reference’s definition of the Jets franchise, which extends to the Atlanta Thrashers, rather than the Utah Hockey Club/Coyotes incarnation that includes the original Jets. Second, Winnipeg gets dinged for being the league’s only market under a metro population of 1 million — but although we also adjust for fan avidity, it still might undersell the support the Jets receive while carrying the banner for that long-awaited Canadian Cup win.
Playoff outlook: If they can hold off the Stars in the Central division, the Jets will set themselves up to face Minnesota in Round 1 — a favorable matchup between a goaltending stalwart and a team struggling to score with Kirill Kaprizov on injured reserve. After that, though, all bets are off in the tough West.
But unlike Edmonton above, the Jets have the best winning percentage against good opponents (73.8%) of any NHL team this season.
There is built-in urgency when you’ve lost to the same opponent in three — going on four — consecutive postseasons. In fact, that might be the main factor the Kings are confronting in the 2025 playoffs: Can they finally beat the Oilers? (Admittedly, this is a way in which the “recent frustration” category lets us down — you can’t rack up playoff wins if you keep losing right away … to the same team.)
But beyond that, the Kings have uncertainty with their core after next season — how long will the Anze Kopitar era last? — and they do play in the NHL’s second-largest market. L.A.’s renaissance in recent seasons is a great story, but if they want it to produce anything beyond early playoff exits, the clock is ticking.
Playoff outlook: Again, the most immediate concern is whether L.A. can finally get past Edmonton, in a battle of teams who each have their own sources of pressure to win right now. Beyond that, the Kings still have the same limitation as last season: Their top-5 defense is held back by an inability to score (No. 18 in goals per game) despite getting a 20-goal season from Warren Foegele after poaching him from the Oilers, of all teams.
But if there’s hope for L.A. to finally get its breakthrough over Edmonton, it’s that they will go into the playoffs in better form (according to Elo) than they did a year ago.
Carolina often strikes a similar profile to Dallas, in terms of highly talented teams that have been trying again and again for that Cup breakthrough in recent years — and their connection was deepened further through the Rantanen trade. So it’s a bit surprising that Carolina’s urgency index is so much lower than that of Dallas. Certainly the teams are similar in terms of contender status, as well as recent frustration: the 2018-19 to 2023-24 Hurricanes have won the second-most playoff games (38) in any six-season span by a team that made zero finals trips over the same range of years. The Canes even check in with an older roster, No. 7 in the league by average age.
One difference is the Raleigh, North Carolina market is among the smallest in the playoff field, even though it punches above its weight in terms of attendance, slicing into the pressure in our formula. And the other is a testament to the job done by former general manager Don Waddell and his successor Eric Tulsky, who reduced the amount of free agent urgency around this core by locking Sebastian Aho, Seth Jarvis, Shayne Gostisbehere, Jaccob Slavin and Andrei Svechnikov into deals that keep them with the club for at least the next two seasons after 2024-25.
Playoff outlook: Carolina will face the New Jersey Devils in Round 1, matching it with a team that has injury problems — Jack Hughes is out for the season and Dougie Hamilton will sit out a chunk of the playoffs as well — but also the No. 4-ranked defense by goals allowed per game.
The Canes are favored as long as they can play their usual puck-control game, and they’ve taken two of three from the Washington Capitals so far in the regular season, which might become pertinent in Round 2. Another trip to the conference finals is very possible, as is the urgency that comes with it.
A lot of the Lightning’s placement comes from ranking as the fourth-oldest team in hockey this season. Though the Bolts have added players since their run of three straight Cup Final appearances in 2020-22, the most notable being Jake Guentzel, each of their other top-10 players by GAR were with the team in at least one of those dynastic seasons.
All of this underscores just how much Tampa Bay is still powered by Andrei Vasilevskiy, Nikita Kucherov, Brayden Point, Victor Hedman and the rest of the core that was so dominant earlier in the decade. But the downside of that reliance is that it comes with urgency to win while they’re all still together and producing, because one never knows when it will end.
Playoff outlook: The Battle of Florida has been a staple rivalry in recent postseasons, with either the Lightning or the Panthers ending the other’s season in 2021, 2022 and 2024 — and we’re probably due for another installment this spring. Although Florida is still the defending champion, Tampa Bay has the better goal differential and Elo rating, as well as far better health as the playoffs near.
Unless Matthew Tkachuk and Sasha Barkov can come back and play well again quickly for the Panthers, the Bolts’ early playoff outlook is far from gloomy.
The Wild seldom have huge expectations as a Cup contender, so it can be difficult to think of them as a team with urgency to win. But although they check in with just a 1% chance to make the Final, Minnesota checks off a lot of the other boxes defining a team under pressure. The Wild are the league’s eighth-oldest team, and they must make deals soon with a number of their key players, from Filip Gustavsson in net to prime-age star Kirill Kaprizov and young Marco Rossi at forward.
And then there’s the building pressure for a team in hockey-mad Minnesota to make a dent in the postseason: In their 23 previous seasons, the Wild have won four playoff series, half of which came in a single magical 2003 postseason. Success for this franchise is long overdue.
Playoff outlook: Said success is, admittedly, not overly likely in 2025. Though they are a good bet to hold the last wild-card spot in the West, the Wild probably will draw either the Jets or Stars in Round 1, where they would be big underdogs in either scenario. Kaprizov hasn’t played since late January because of a lower-body injury, and he will have to shake off the rust even if he returns by the playoffs.
Again, the expectations aren’t necessarily there for a deep playoff run — or else we might really be talking about how badly this team needs to win a playoff series.
Ranking the rest
I was a little surprised Washington didn’t crack the top eight, as this unexpectedly amazing season — capped off by Ovechkin’s record goal — creates plenty of pressure to cash in with a Cup. But the truth is, Washington’s front office has done an excellent job of building a bridge to a sustainable post-Ovechkin future, which reduces the franchise’s urgency index. (And they won a Cup fairly recently anyway.)
The rest of the list is a mix of other recent winners (Vegas, Florida, Colorado, St. Louis) or just longshots to win. And the Devils and Canadiens are especially interesting cases — the former is a team that has gone from young and up-and-coming to one of the oldest rosters in the league, increasing the urgency level; the latter made a surprising late-season run in one of the league’s top hockey markets, though their youth might mean the future really begins next season and beyond.
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