The NHL teams with the best and worst depth so far this season (and everybody in between)

Having great players is important. Having good players around them is also important.

When it comes to trying to figure out which teams are serious Stanley Cup contenders in any given season, one of my go-to barometers is simply: How does this team perform when its best players are not on the ice?

You need high-level, superstar players to have a serious chance to win a Stanley Cup. Whether they are elite offensive forwards, dominant two-way players, or a bonafide No. 1 defenseman you need somebody (and usually more than one) that is at the top of their position.

That is the foundation.

But no matter how good those foundational players are, they are not going to be able to do it all by themselves when it comes to actually winning a championship. Over the course of an 82-game season even the best players are going to go cold offensively at times. Sometimes they will get outplayed for a few games.

Even when those top players are going great, they are only going to play, at most, a third of the game. That leaves a lot of time for everybody else on the roster to mess things up. You need players that can avoid doing that and help pick up the slack when the production is not there for the superstars.

All of this can be especially true in a best-of-seven playoff series where the margins between winning and losing become razor thin.

Sometimes top players can cancel each other out and it comes down to which team has a third line with Phil Kessel or Blake Coleman on it.

Now that we are getting through the first quarter of the 2025-26 NHL season, let’s take a look at the NHL’s best and worst performing teams without their top players on the ice (as well as every team stuck in the middle).

The process here is simple: I am looking at every NHL team’s top-two scorers entering play on Monday, and then looking at how each team has performed when they are NOT on the ice during 5-on-5 play in terms of both goal-differential (GF%) and Expected Goal Share (xGF%).

Are you out-scoring your opponent? Are you out-chancing them?

It is very simple.

I have very good news for Carolina, Colorado and … perhaps surprisingly … Los Angeles.

I have very bad news for Edmonton, New Jersey, Winnipeg and Vegas.

Let’s get into it, first looking at the teams that have been the deepest in the NHL this season.

There are four teams in the NHL that have a 50 percent share or better in both goal differential and expected goal share when their top-two scorers are not on the ice.

Those teams:

Seeing Carolina at the top of that list is not really a surprise. While the Hurricanes always lack a Connor McDavid/Sidney Crosby level superstar on their roster, they always have a rock-solid team from top-to-bottom that has almost no weaknesses. There are a lot of interchangeable pieces here that just fit in up-and-down the roster with a strong system and strong structure. It is not always entertaining to watch, but dammit it works and it wins a lot of games.

Colorado is also an absolute wagon this season. Nathan MacKinnon and Martin Necas are doing a lot of heavy lifting at the top of the lineup, but look at what the rest of the team is doing when those two guys are not on the ice. Not only in terms of how much they score and how many chances they create, but also how many more goals and chances they create than their opponents. Dominant team right now. Very dominant.

I am a little surprised to see Los Angeles doing so well here, simply because I really thought they fumbled their offseason with the way they handled their defense. Cody Ceci and Brian Dumoulin are still potential liabilities, and I would like to see a little more offense out of this team before I call it a serious Stanley Cup contender, but it is really hard to argue against the results from this team so far.

Tampa Bay’s biggest problem right now is simply they are not getting the type of offense they normally get from their top players. The rest of the lineup is defending well and generating chances, but not quite finishing them yet.

Now let’s get into the rest of the teams in the NHL and where they fit. Some teams just have bad depth. Some teams are getting a good process with bad results. Others are getting good results with a bad process. Some teams are just average.

Let’s talk about all of them.