Winners and Losers From the 2026 NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs So Far
The NHL's conference finals are underway with the Carolina Hurricanes, Montreal Canadiens, Colorado Avalanche, and Vegas Golden Knights all playing for the opportunity to win the Stanley Cup.
Carolina and Colorado were the two most dominant teams throughout the first two rounds, but Montreal and Vegas are going to be formidable obstacles standing in their path for a championship.
Now that we are through two rounds and one game into the conference final, let's take a deeper look at some of the biggest winners and losers from the playoffs so far. Not only among the teams still playing, but also among the teams that have already been eliminated.
Winner: Mitch Marner (Vegas Golden Knights)
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There is nobody who is doing more for their reputation as a player this postseason than Mitch Marner.
It's not that he was a bad player before this season; he obviously wasn't. He was always a top-line player, top-tier scorer, and outstanding two-way winger.
But with every Toronto Maple Leafs postseason failure and every Game 5, 6, or 7 in which he did not score a goal, the outside noise and criticism would continue to build. It ultimately led the Maple Leafs to make a change to their core and send him to Vegas this past offseason.
He spent the regular season doing what he always does.
Now he is rewriting the narrative around his play and himself in the playoffs.
He enters Game 2 of the Western Conference Final as the top-scorer in the playoffs and emerging as a leading Conn Smythe Trophy favorite. He has been one of Vegas' best players and one of the biggest reasons it enters play on Friday, just three wins away from returning to the Stanley Cup Final.
If the Golden Knights actually pull it off and Marner continues this pace and takes home the Conn Smythe Trophy, his career and reputation will forever be changed.
Loser: Stan Bowman
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The Edmonton Oilers failed to make it out of the first round, letting another prime year of Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl's careers pass by without a Stanley Cup win.
Bowman has to own the failure this time.
The team took a massive step backward on the ice in both the regular season and the playoffs, and a wildly flawed roster, made worse by pretty much every move they made over the past year, is the biggest reason why.
Bowman's tenure in Edmonton has been, to this point, a gigantic disappointment and failure, as every major move has backfired.
His tenure began by letting Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg walk in restricted free agency.
It continued with him giving trading for Trent Frederic and giving him a massive contract extension that has turned into an albatross.
He traded away Viktor Arvidsson and replaced him with Andrew Mangiapane, only to watch Mangiapane completely wash out, get waived and eventually get traded.
But the masterpiece of incompetence came when he traded Stuart Skinner, Brett Kulak and a future second-round draft pick for the remainder of Tristan Jarry's contract.
It was a shocking move at the time. It only became more shocking as Jarry played his way out of the starting job and found himself on the bench for the stretch run of the regular season and most of the playoffs.
He not only made the goalie situation worse, he made it worse for more years (Skinner is an unrestricted free agent this summer while Jarry is signed for two more full years) and gave up two valuable assets (Kulak, who is now a major player for Colorado's defense, and a second-round pick) to make it happen.
That move alone is a fireable offense.
But instead of making a general manager change, the Oilers allowed Bowman to make a head-coaching change by firing Kris Knoblauch.
Things are grim here.
Winner: Eric Tulsky
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I am going to put Carolina's Game 1 performance in the Eastern Conference Final on the back burner for now.
It happened. It was bad. It continued Carolina's struggles in this round. But after winning eight straight games to open the playoffs, and with a 12-day layoff between games, there had to be at least some expectation for a letdown at some point. It happened.
But Carolina is still very much in the series and still has a great chance to break through to the Stanley Cup Final. If it does, Tulsky deserves a ton of credit for that, given the moves he has made over the past year-and-a-half.
The Mikko Rantanen situation looked bad from an optics perspective, but getting Taylor Hall, Logan Stankoven, and eventually K'Andre Miller out of that, plus an additional first-round pick that can be further used as trade bait, was a huge, massive win. Hall, Stankoven, and Miller have all played pivotal roles in Carolina's early playoff dominance.
Tulsky and the Hurricanes have also locked in significant parts of their young core to long-term, team-friendly contracts that will continue to give them long-term flexibility to keep adding to their roster. A lot of that flexibility was put into place in the offseason when they signed Nikolaj Ehlers in unrestricted free agency, giving the team another much-needed impact forward.
It is a fantastically deep, talented roster that has almost no real weaknesses. Tulsky and his management team deserve a ton of credit for that.
Loser: Some of the Big Pending UFAs
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This specifically applies to Anthony Mantha (Pittsburgh Penguins) and Alex Tuch (Buffalo Sabres).
Mantha scored a career-high 33 goals with the Penguins after signing a dirt cheap one-year contract.
Tuch continued to play like a top-line player during the regular season for the Sabres.
Both players set themselves up to be big-time players in what is a laughably weak free agent class.
And then both players came up small in the biggest moments when everybody was watching them.
Mantha was one of the Penguins' worst players in their first-round loss to the Philadelphia Flyers, failing to score a goal and having now played 20 playoff games in his career with zero goals.
Tuch, meanwhile, put up a goose egg in Buffalo's second-round series loss to the Montreal Canadiens.
Will these performances keep teams from signing them and giving them millions this summer? No. Somebody is going to pay up, mostly because somebody has to sign free agents and somebody has to spend money. But they may have cost themselves at least a little bit of money and interest. If nothing else, they are going to have a lot to prove going into next season.
Winner: Jakub Dobeš (Montreal Canadiens)
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There have been a lot of stars in Montreal's run to the Eastern Conference Final so far, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most surprising, has been their starting goalie, Jakub Dobeš.
While Montreal's top line has at times been quiet, Dobes has been a wall in net, and through Game 1 against Carolina, owns a .911 save percentage and has saved 11.9 goals above expected (via Moneypuck). That is two goals better than any other goalie in the NHL this postseason.
Montreal's core already looked fantastic with the young forwards and top defensemen, and now it should feel extremely confident it has a potentially upper-level goalie to go with that group.
Loser: Central Division
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While the Western Conference and Pacific Division looked extremely watered down this season, the Central Division seemed to stand out as a potential playoff gauntlet.
Colorado has been the best team in the NHL from the start.
Dallas and Minnesota were both top-six teams all season and looked to be bona fide Stanley Cup contenders.
Utah was everybody's sleeper pick going into the playoffs.
In the end? The Dallas-Minnesota series was kind of a dud, and then Minnesota was unceremoniously dumped by Colorado.
Utah, meanwhile, did not get out of the first round.
There was always going to be the reality that one of Dallas and Minnesota would lose in the first round, while only one of the top-three teams could make it to the Conference Final, but it was still an underwhelming postseason showing for the division.
Winner: Fans of (Some) Perpetually Rebuilding Teams
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Specifically, the fans of Buffalo and Anaheim.
Buffalo spent 14 years in the gutter before this season.
Anaheim was on an eight-year playoff drought.
Both teams not only made the playoffs to snap those droughts but also won a playoff series, advanced to the second round, and established a new core that could be the foundation for the future.
The Ducks have one of the best collections of young forward talent in the NHL, and players like Leo Carlsson, Beckett Sennecke, and Cutter Gauthier all had major breakouts this season and in the playoffs.
The Sabres, meanwhile, helped awaken a sleeping giant of a hockey city and finally gave their long-suffering fans reason to believe.
It was a similar story in Philadelphia where the Flyers snapped their playoff drought and eliminated their long-time, cross-state rivals, the Pittsburgh Penguins, in six games. Even though they got swept in the second round it was still a big step forward in their rebuild and resulted in Flyers fans giving them a positive send-off following their playoff run.
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