A group of all-world defenders highlights the next crop of stars on our top 50 ranking, along with a couple of veteran goaltenders who’ve racked up four Stanley Cups between them.
Before the new NHL campaign begins a week from now, we’re revisiting that age-old question: Who is the best in the game at this moment? Who’s on the cusp of dominating the league this season, of putting their club on their back and carrying it to the promised land?
We turned to our Sportsnet Insiders for their insight, asking them to rank the top 50 players in the NHL. Not the top scorers or the top defenders, the top two-way talents or the top netminders — simply the game’s best right now. All positions, all skill-sets, one list.
There was only one rule: As with last year’s list, this ranking is forward-looking. It doesn’t factor in legacy or past performance, it considers only how the league’s best are expected to stack up against each other in 2025-26.
The ranking below is an amalgam of the Top 50 lists from Insiders across the network. For each individual list, players were assigned points based on how high they finished in that particular ranking — the higher they ranked on an Insider’s list, the more points they accrued.
Each player’s position on the overall ranking is a result of how many total points they collected across all our Insiders’ lists.
With that, here is Sportsnet’s ranking of the Top 50 Players in the NHL, continuing with Nos. 40-31.
50-41 | 40-31 | 30-21 | 20-11 | 10-1
There’s a lot of praise heaped on all manner of players who suit up at Jaccob Slavin’s position — all-world scorers who start rushes from the backend, power-play specialists who can unload from the point, dynamic skaters who can weave through traffic as good as anyone in the game. But when it comes to pure defence — the art of perfect positioning, the ability to disrupt passes with a well-placed stick, the willingness to throw your body in front of a puck — there are few better than Jaccob Slavin. The veteran has been stifling the game’s best scorers for years and, at 31 years old, still remains one of the best nullifiers of offensive creativity in the sport. While he’s never had his name engraved on the Norris Trophy, Slavin’s earned votes for the award every year since he was a rookie. It’s a fair bet he’ll pick up a few more by the end of 2025-26.
If Slavin’s game is emblematic of the old school, Jake Sanderson is as good a representative of the new school as you’ll find. Still only 23 years old, the Ottawa Senators rearguard has grown leaps and bounds in each of his three seasons in the big leagues. But the most recent campaign saw Sanderson take the step from promise to performance, putting up 57 points, skating more than 24 minutes a night, and establishing himself as one of the game’s top young defenders. It was in the latter half of the season that he truly took off: From mid-January to the end of the season, Sanderson was among the top four blue-line scorers in the game, only Cale Makar, Rasmus Dahlin, and Evan Bouchard outdoing his 33 points in 37 games to close out the year. Now, fresh off his first taste of playoff hockey, he’ll be expected to take another step and bring the upstart Senators along with him.
The final game of Evan Bouchard’s 2024-25 campaign no doubt left a sour taste in the mouths of Edmonton Oilers fans. Despite two seasons of offensive dominance from the blue-line star — 82 points in 2023-24, 67 points last year, and a combined 55 playoff points over the club’s back-to-back Cup Final runs — it’s tough to look past Bouchard’s performance in Game 6 against the Florida Panthers. Two tough shifts, two giveaways, and two crucial goals for the eventual champs in the biggest game of Edmonton’s season. Still, the totality of Bouchard’s contributions to the Oilers’ cause over the past two seasons outweighs a rough night on the post-season stage. The organization confirmed as much when they inked him to a four-year, $42-million deal this past summer, making him one of the highest-paid defenders in the league. They’ll no doubt be expecting a bounce-back effort from the 25-year-old as Edmonton looks to claw its way back, and finally reach the Stanley Cup summit.
Just a year older than Bouchard, Adam Fox has similarly made his name as one of the most prolific blue-line scorers in the game. Winning the Norris Trophy in 2021 and earning another nomination in 2023, the 26-year-old has emerged as an all-world talent from the New York Rangers’ backend. Over the past four seasons, only two defencemen have amassed more points than Fox’s 280 — Makar and Quinn Hughes, widely regarded as the two best in the world. Still, like Bouchard, Fox is coming off a season where he didn’t seem at his best. He still finished with 61 points to his name — ninth-most among NHL defenders — but that sum aside, there seemed something missing, the Jericho, N.Y., product unable to swing games the way he had in the past. That the Rangers also endured a tumultuous year as a whole — missing the playoffs after winning the Presidents’ Trophy a year prior — didn’t help. The Blueshirts will be looking for a return to form in 2025-26, and a resurgent year from Fox is no small part of that equation.
It’s fitting that the 2025-26 campaign should see Mark Scheifele become the Winnipeg Jets’ franchise leader in points — the veteran centreman sits just eight back of Blake Wheeler for the all-time scoring crown — because No. 55 remains the engine that propels the club forward. After a few years of steady progress, Winnipeg found a new level in 2024-25, winning the first Presidents’ Trophy in franchise history, and it was due in no small part to a career year from Scheifele. Playing out the first season of a seven-year, $59.5-million deal, the veteran put up a career-best 87 points. He also paced the league with 11 game-winning goals — the second time in the past three years he’s registered double-digit game-winners. But it was in the final game of the year that Scheifele truly showed his dedication to his club, suiting up for an incredibly emotional Game 6 against the Dallas Stars a day after losing his father, Brad. Even then, he performed, scoring the Jets’ only goal of the night. There’s no question he remains a crucial piece of the Jets’ identity and will be a key part of Winnipeg’s fight to reach the post-season’s latter rounds in 2026.
There was a time when Sergei Bobrovsky’s $10-million cap hit was questioned by fans across the hockey world. The criticism rolled in after a few subpar early playoff showings in a Florida Panthers uniform, with some wondering why the Cats shelled out one of the biggest goalie contracts in league history for a veteran who might be past his prime. Fast-forward a few years and ‘Playoff Bob’ is one of the few sure things in post-season hockey. The 36-year-old has reasserted himself as a mentality monster, leading Florida to three straight Stanley Cup Finals, winning the past two, and holding at bay the likes of Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl to earn those Cup rings. It’s not about the numbers for Bobrovsky, it’s simply his ability to meet the moment, to consistently give his club the performance they need on the night they need it. Florida’s chances of a three-peat in 2026 hinge on him continuing to do just that.
The past three seasons have been career-altering for Josh Morrissey. After half a decade as a steady depth piece in Winnipeg, the Calgary product exceeded all expectations when he broke out with a 16-goal, 76-point effort in 2022-23. He’s collected 131 points in the two seasons since, earning Norris Trophy votes all three years. The key for Morrissey is versatility. An elite blue-line scorer — over those three years, only Makar, Hughes and Erik Karlsson have amassed more points among rearguards — Morrissey’s proven just as adept in his own zone. It’s no coincidence that Winnipeg claimed the 2025 Presidents’ Trophy on the back of a solid defensive campaign. Without the play of their No. 1 defenceman, they don’t reach those heights. Still flying somewhat under-the-radar even after a few seasons of Norris consideration, the 30-year-old figures to be a crucial cog in the Jets machine once again next season — and play a key role for Canada, too.
Sebastian Aho finds himself in a tough spot. The Carolina Hurricanes star has been, in many ways, a model No. 1 centreman: good for 30 goals and 70 points, earning Selke Trophy votes every year, an all-situations talent you can send over the boards when the stakes are highest. And he puts up numbers in the playoffs, too — since debuting in the league, Aho’s collected the seventh-most post-season points of anyone in the game. Still, there’s a sense around the hockey world that the Finnish pivot has another level to reach. It’s much the same sentiment that’s been attached to his Hurricanes for years — a contender that hasn’t yet taken the final step to earn a real crack at the Cup (partly due to the fact they keep running into the Panthers). But like Florida’s own Finnish leader, Aho has the skill-set to be the quiet catalyst for Carolina’s eventual success, as long as his club can put the right pieces around him. The arrival of Nikolaj Ehlers on his wing should help matters this time around, as the Hurricanes once again set their sights on the playoffs’ latter rounds.
After a half-decade in the league and all the progress he’s found, it’s easy to forget how young Tim Stutzle still is. The Ottawa Senators’ talisman put the NHL on notice in 2022-23 with a breakout 39-goal, 90-point performance. It’s been rougher going since then, as the young German has found himself unable to replicate those numbers in each of the past two seasons. But it’s only a matter of time for Stutzle. Still only 23 years old, the 2020 third-overall pick has already proven he can unleash electrifying offensive skill on the league. The past season was about building out the rest of his game, proving he can thrive as a two-way talent, too. And he did, that shift pivotal in helping his Senators earn their first playoff berth in nearly a decade and claim a couple post-season wins against their provincial rivals, too. Now, with that playoff experience under his belt and a better sense of how to be an all-around threat at the NHL level, the task ahead is clear: push his ceiling even higher, pull his Sens back to the post-season, and make even more noise once he gets there.
It was largely a resurgent campaign for Andrei Vasilevskiy in 2024-25. After three seasons of steadily declining numbers, the two-time Cup champion seemed to find his form in the regular season, reestablishing himself among the game’s best and earning his first Vezina Trophy nomination in four years. But the post-season was another story. It wasn’t long ago that most around the game tabbed No. 88 as the top netminder in the league. But after their own Panthers-esque run of three straight trips to the Final and two Cup rings claimed, the Bolts have endured three straight years of first-round exits. The past two have been particularly painful, Tampa losing out to their state rival and managing only one win in each series. Vasilevskiy was near unbeatable back when the Bolts were flying — over the club’s three Cup Final runs between 2020 and ’22, he put up a .928 save percentage in the playoffs and collected seven shutouts, earning the Conn Smythe Trophy in 2021. Over the past three years, he’s averaged .882 in the post-season. With Nikita Kucherov racking up scoring titles and Victor Hedman still earning Norris votes, the Bolts have the pieces to make some post-season noise — but it needs to start with Vasilevskiy rediscovering his form on the playoff stage.
Check back Wednesday for Nos. 30-21.
from Sportsnet.ca
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