The Atlantic Division has been turned on its head, and the race to the top is suddenly wide open.
Buffalo finished last season with the best regular-season record in the division, rolling to 50-23-9 and 109 points. Montreal and Tampa Bay weren’t far behind at 106 points apiece, while Boston answered its 2024-25 playoff miss by getting back in with 100 points and a Wildcard berth.
Then there’s the other side of the picture. Toronto missed the postseason a year after taking the Atlantic crown in 2024-25. Florida, despite winning the Stanley Cup in 2024 and 2025 and reaching the Final in each of the previous three seasons, also fell out of the playoff field after injuries piled up through 2025-26.
The offseason only added more uncertainty. Ottawa sent captain Brady Tkachuk to Florida, while Detroit captain Dylan Larkin asked for a trade and handed the Red Wings a short list of teams he’d accept a move to.
So who actually owns this division heading into 2026-27?
That was the question Tyler Yaremchuk and former NHL goaltender Carter Hutton tackled on last Friday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, and both leaned into the idea that the Atlantic could look very different again next season.
Yaremchuk pointed to Toronto as the team that added the most volume, while also noting Florida’s major roster shakeup with Brady Tkachuk coming in and a change in goal. Montreal, he said, stayed mostly the same.
Tampa Bay lost Darren Raddysh and Nick Paul. Buffalo, in his view, didn’t do enough to convince him it had gotten better.
When it came time to fill in the blank - “The best team in the Atlantic Division is _____?” - Hutton went with Florida.
“This is a really hard question. I think I’m going to go with the Florida Panthers.
I just think having a healthy amount of time off, a full and recovered Aleksander Barkov, you’ve got Brady Tkachuk. I know you could make an argument for a lot of these teams and I think it’s going to be a dog fight, but I have to pick the best team and it’s the Panthers.”
Yaremchuk stayed with Tampa Bay.
“I think I still might go with the Tampa Bay Lightning. I like their crease situation, way more than I like the crease situation in Florida.
Give me Andrei Vasilevskiy and Dennis Hildeby over Jacob Markstrom or Akira Schmid. I look at the Lightning’s blue line, and while they lost Raddysh, they’re replacing him with John Carlson, and that’s not the biggest step back, at least for next season.
A fully healthy Victor Hedman, that goes hand-in-hand with a fully healthy Aleksander Barkov.”
He also pointed to Tampa’s firepower up front, citing Nikita Kucherov, Jake Guentzel, Brandon Hagel and Anthony Cirelli, and said the Lightning have enough upside to make up the three-point gap they finished behind Buffalo by last season. In his view, the goaltending edge is where Tampa separates itself from Florida.
The bigger picture is simple: the Atlantic doesn’t have a settled pecking order right now, and both hosts saw enough moving parts to keep the door open for a new No. 1 in 2026-27.
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