NHL Pacific Division Preview: Who Is the Team to Beat?

With the NHL’s season now officially underway, now’s a good time to preview how the Pacific Division will play out this year. 

This division is home to two of the teams most frequently picked as Stanley Cup winners ahead of the 2025-26 season: Edmonton and Las Vegas. 

But beyond those two at the top, there are many interesting watchable teams and some that are probably unwatchable but still interesting. 

Here’s a full preview of the division with odds as of October 14. 

Edmonton Oilers

• Win Stanley Cup Odds: +775
• Win Conference Odds: +400
• Win Division Odds: +135
• Make Playoff Odds: -1100

Coming off a second-straight Stanley Cup Finals loss, the Oilers are the current favorites to win the championship this year. 

I spent the whole offseason feeling ready to believe in a Western Conference team other than Edmonton and an Eastern Conference team other than Florida. 

But now, with the season underway, I don’t know anymore. The safest thing to do in the NHL right now is just to believe that we’ll get the 2020s NHL equivalent of Cavs-Warriors again. 

My crutch for not believing in the Oilers was the mythical fable of ‘Connor McDavid’s UFA status will become a locker room problem.’ Even that is gone now after McDavid took a two-year deal with a lower AAV than Kirill Kaprizov, which makes sense because, as we all know, Kaprizov is the superior player. 

You don’t really need me to repeat facts surrounding Edmonton’s insane one-two punch comprised of two Hart candidates in McDavid and Leon Draisaitl. The Oilers are a very similar team to last year. The same concerns — goaltending and otherwise — will persist. 

The Oilers are as strong a Stanley Cup contender as they have been in recent years. They just need to convert on a championship window at some point. 

Vegas Golden Knights

• Win Stanley Cup Odds: +800
• Win Conference Odds: +425
• Win Division Odds: +140
• Make Playoff Odds: -1100

Vegas had a great summer. 

They signed the big-ticket free agent, Mitch Marner, to a reasonable eight-year, $96 million contract. Then, right before the season began, they gave center Jack Eichel another relatively reasonable eight-year, $108M extension. 

The Knights can pair those two top forwards with a deep roster, both on the offensive front and the blue line. 

So, two seasons after winning the expansion franchise’s first Stanley Cup, they now have two of the league’s best forwards locked up for eight years to decent deals in a league with a rising salary cap. 

One concern for Vegas, in my view, is the age of the roster. The Knights have an average age of 28.83, which is the seventh-oldest roster in the league. 

Marner, Eichel, and defenseman Noah Hanifin are all 28, and goalie Adin Hill is 29. However, outside of these four, all the other pieces on the roster are over the age of 30. 

This isn’t entirely a bad thing, just look at the back-to-back Stanley Cup champion Panthers, who have the third-oldest team in the league. But it means fatigue and injuries are more of a concern for the Golden Knights. Beyond that, it also means that Vegas’ contending window isn’t getting any bigger. 

Although Edmonton has slightly better odds than them to win the Pacific, I’d say that the Golden Knights will be just as good a regular-season team as the Oilers and maybe have a better shot at winning the division just because of their goaltending. 

As for the important part in the springtime, it remains to be seen how well Vegas’ new-look roster will stack up against Edmonton in a playoff series. 

Right now, I’d still give the Oilers the edge. 

Los Angeles Kings

• Win Stanley Cup Odds: +2800
• Win Conference Odds: +1100
• Win Division Odds: +650
• Make Playoff Odds: -250

It was an awkward opening night for the Kings as their major free agent signing, Corey Perry, got booed by the Crypto.com Arena fans because of his association with LA’s main rival, Edmonton. 

Maybe this is a stretch, but I think that’s a good metaphor for how some fans may receive the transitional year the Kings have ahead of them as they shake off the remnants of their 2010s Stanley Cup teams and prepare for a new era. 

The 2025-26 season will be the last for LA’s captain, Anze Kopitar. He and defenseman Drew Doughty are the last two players remaining from the Kings’ 2014 Stanley Cup-winning team. 

Perry may not be a welcome sight for Kings fans who’d rather ignore the age of their former core and continue dancing with the Oilers with the proverbial one that brung ya, but he’s had more playoff experience than LA has had in recent years. 

The Kings have lost in a first-round series against Edmonton for four years straight now.

Bringing in one of their depth pieces, Perry, may be what shakes up that result. LA actually brought in a fair deal of new blood this offseason, including defensemen Cody Ceci and Brian Dumoulin, making the most of what was a limited free agent pool in the NHL. 

I see the Kings as a solid team that should make the playoffs, but probably won’t do much when they get there, especially if they draw another first-round matchup against the Oilers. At the same time, with the second-oldest team in the league, I could see them going full-rebuild at the deadline if there’s a rough start to the year. 

Vancouver Canucks

• Win Stanley Cup Odds: +6000
• Win Conference Odds: +3000
• Win Division Odds: +1400
• Make Playoff Odds: -105

Last year, Vancouver continued a time-honored NHL tradition of firing your head coach shortly after they’ve won the Jack Adams Award. 

Rick Tocchet led the Canucks out of a three-year playoff drought in the 2023-24 season, earning him the league’s coach of the year honors, but he was dismissed after Vancouver failed to make the playoffs last year. 

The quick trigger on some of these team executives is shocking. Is it really Tocchet’s fault that the Canucks had some regression last season?

It seemed that Vancouver’s problem was that its best player, Quinn Hughes, dealt with injury issues throughout the season and ended up missing 14 games. Is the Canucks front office concealing that Tocchet pulled a Tonya Harding sabotage move on Hughes that somehow caused a torn hand ligament and a torn oblique?  

Tocchet now coaches for the Flyers and will probably hope to stay out of the coach of the year conversation so his kids don’t have to change schools again. 

It wasn’t just firing coaches for the Vancouver brass this offseason. They also managed to get some extensions done with forwards Brock Boeser and Conor Garland and with goalie Thatcher Demko. 

The odds don’t like the Canucks this season, probably because of a lingering bad taste from the way last year went. But I think Vancouver is an injury-free-Hughes season away from being a contender in the Western Conference again. 

Anaheim Ducks

• Win Stanley Cup Odds: +12500
• Win Conference Odds: +5000
• Win Division Odds: +3500
• Make Playoff Odds: +260

Anaheim enters this season with a new coach, a new top-line center, and hopes that they can break a seven-year playoff drought. 

This summer, the Ducks hired former Blackhawks head coach and three-time Stanley Cup winner Joel Quenneville. Quenneville has been out of the league since a suspension in 2021 stemming from the Chicago sexual assault scandal. The NHL reinstated Quenneville as well as other former Blackhawks personnel in July 2024. 

Quenneville is currently a +750 favorite to win the Jack Adams Award for coach of the year. 

Hiring a new coach wasn’t the only major shakeup this offseason for Anaheim. They also traded would-be franchise icon Trevor Zegras to the Philadelphia Flyers. 

The main impasse between the Ducks and Zegras seemed to be Zegras wanting to be paid and treated like a superstar, while Anaheim did not think he was one. Zegras had 12 goals and 20 assists in 57 games played in his final season with the Ducks. 

Now, 20-year-old Leo Carlsson will fill that top-line center spot for Anaheim and hopefully fulfill some of the promise that Zegras once had. 

Another major storyline for the Ducks this summer was the incredible marketing campaign they mounted around 10th overall pick Roger McQueen. 

Anaheim has a long-standing relationship with the Walt Disney Corporation and has leveraged that once again to make McQueen share an identity with the Cars protagonist, and seven-time Piston Cup champion, Lightning McQueen. 

Roger McQueen took a much filmed and photographed trip to Disneyland after being drafted to announce that he will wear 95 this season, the same number that Lightning McQueen had in Cars. 

Maybe Roger can co-opt some of Lightning’s championship pedigree to help the Ducks get back into the playoffs. 

Calgary Flames

• Win Stanley Cup Odds: +15000
• Win Conference Odds: +6000
• Win Division Odds: +6000
• Make Playoff Odds: +350

Calgary seems to be in that awkward limbo between contending for a final wild card spot and fully rebuilding. 

The Flames finished last season with a 41-27-14 record, landing them in the fourth-place spot in the Pacific Division. It was the third season in a row that Calgary missed the playoffs. 

They failed to rebound from the end of the Matthew Tkachuk, Johnny Guadreu, and Sam Bennett era of the team — if you can even call it an era.

Nothing of note ever grew out of the returns that the Flames got for that group, and the remaining players from that period haven’t accomplished much either. Calgary does have a Vezina-Trophy-caliber goalie talent in Dustin Wolf, but outside of that, there really isn’t much to write home about. 

If things get really ugly for the Flames this year, I could see them shipping off the complimentary pieces they have on their roster and going after the coveted number-one-pick in Gavin McKenna.

Seattle Kraken

• Win Stanley Cup Odds: +20000
• Win Conference Odds: +10000
• Win Division Odds: +6000
• Make Playoff Odds: +360

Seattle is hoping to build back some momentum this season after two straight playoff misses. 

The Kraken had a 35-41-6 record last year, their fourth season as a franchise, which earned them a seventh-place finish in the Pacific. 

You would think that after making the playoffs in their second year as a franchise and taking down the defending champion Colorado Avalanche in the first round, they’d be in a better spot heading into this year. 

I like a lot of the pieces on the Kraken roster. They have an intriguing core of players, including center Matty Beniers, who scored 20 goals last season, and defenseman Vince Dunn. 

But I don’t know if there’s enough there for them to make a run towards the playoffs. 

Seattle is one of those teams that needs a little more time in the oven. 

It’s not that they’ve had any managerial blunders or major disappointments on the roster. They just need a little more time to build. 

San Jose Sharks

• Win Stanley Cup Odds: +50000
• Win Conference Odds: +25000
• Win Division Odds: +30000
• Make Playoff Odds: +1000

Right now, San Jose is the good vibes capital of the NHL. 

If you took the Sharks and moved them to an East Coast city or an Original Six city, we would be having a wildly different conversation about them. But they’re a fun team, with young players, and limited expectations. 

In a city like Toronto, Chicago, or Boston, the fans and media would be on the Sharks every day, melting down about the team having six losing seasons in a row. 

In California, they’ll just tell you to relax and be patient. Maybe more cities should follow a similar model. 

Last season, they had an abysmal 20-50-12 but Macklin Celebrini lived up to his hype, so nothing else mattered. In his rookie season, Celebrini, still only 19 years old, scored 25 goals and had 38 assists last season with San Jose. 

This season, the Sharks have Celebrini and fellow rookie Will Smith entering sophomore seasons, and another highly-rated prospect, Michael Misa, joining the team as well. Misa had an astounding 134 points in 65 games played last season with the OHL’s Saginaw Spirit. 

Don’t expect San Jose’s playoff drought to get snapped this season, but the future is bright for the Sharks.