NHL Player Tiers 2025-26: Connor McDavid is the undisputed best, Sidney Crosby is ageless
NHL Player Tiers 2025-26: Connor McDavid is the undisputed best, Sidney Crosby is ageless
By Sean Gentille, Shayna Goldman and Dom Luszczyszyn
This article is part of our Rankings & Tiers series, an evaluation across sport about the key players, front offices, teams, franchises and much more.
If you’ve ever wondered how challenging it can be to assemble our NHL Player Tiers, take it from two of our returning panelists.
“Every year, it gets a little easier,” a data analyst said.
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“This is the third time we’ve done this, and the list seems tighter and tighter each time,” a coach said.
Clear as mud. That’s the task, though — blending new-school data with old-school wisdom to create the definitive list of hockey’s greatest stars. If everyone had the same take on a player’s individual merits, how they stack up against each other, or the difficulty level of the project overall, it wouldn’t be half as interesting.
With that in mind, we’re back with a sixth installment of our list of the top players in the league. For the second straight season, we’ve separated 150 players into five groups: MVP cornerstones, franchise pillars, All-Star candidates, the true stars and elite support. Last year, we added a fifth tier and 25 slots and incorporated goaltenders for the first time, and we carried that template into 2025.
For those new here, this isn’t your typical ranking — because it isn’t really a ranking. It’s a hierarchy, one in which grouping players together is the primary feature and is meant to illustrate the diversity of viewpoints within the sport. There are levels to the league and sub-levels within each basket of players. While one player may be more well-liked by some over another, another group may see it differently.
“You can sit and argue all day about some of these guys,” one general manager said. “They’re all good players, and some of it’s personal preference.” Not that there’s anything wrong with personal preference, either. Enough expressions of preference create a sort of consensus, one that celebrates the uncertainty that comes with ranking players. Sometimes it’s definitive — we know Connor McDavid is better than, well, everyone. Sometimes it’s not, where the space between Thomas Harley and Jake Sanderson still puts them in the same tier.
As for the process: We start with a modeled output based on projected Net Ratings, an all-in-one stat that aims to measure a player’s contribution to his team’s goal differential. It combines a player’s production with his play-driving ability and accounts for the difficulty of his usage — zero means an average player and plus-10 means an elite one. First-line forwards start at plus-five while top-pair defensemen start a little lower, at plus-three. An average starting goalie comes in at plus-seven.
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Then, after hours of internal deliberation, shuffling and re-shuffling based on where we believe the modeled output feels like it missed the mark, we settle on our initial tiered groups. That’s what lands in the hands of our panelists, who use it as a baseline for their own lists. Players move up, players move down, players are added and players are removed. Most follow-up calls start the same way: “Tell us where we’re wrong.”
Our group of panelists has never been larger. This year, we spoke to more than 20 people inside the game — general managers, executives, coaches, scouts and data analysts, all in fairly equal amounts. We also, for the first time, included a handful of former NHL players.
Through hours and hours’ worth of conversation — we’re lucky to have them, by the way — we record every bit of analysis, every instance of shuffling, every time a source says anything as simple as “I have Player X farther up,” and we reconvene. This year, incorporating that input into our final list took a full day’s worth of meetings. After all that, we write.
The end result, we hope, is a prime example of quantifiable data combined with qualitative opinions, and the most vetted list of the NHL’s best available for public consumption.
We have our reasons for why each player lands where they do, found below along with projected stats for next season — all in a filterable list by team, position and age.
Enjoy, and let the debates begin.
The Rankings and Tiers series is sponsored by E*Trade from Morgan Stanley. The Athletic maintains full editorial independence. Sponsors have no control over or input into the reporting or editing process and do not review stories before publication.
(Top illustration: Will Tulos / The Athletic; Joe Sargent, David Berding, Derek Cain / Getty Images)