One Playoff Run Is Doing All the Work in Montreal's Power Ranking
NHL power rankings for August 2026 feature the Canadiens at fourth after a strong playoff run, while Carolina sits at 16th despite winning the Cup.
Montreal is fourth on ESPN’s way-too-early board. Carolina, which won the Stanley Cup in June, is 16th on The Hockey News’s off-season rankings. Both of those can be defended, and holding them side by side explains what an August ranking is actually measuring.
Rankings reward direction, results reward June
The Canadiens went 48-24-10 and reached the Eastern Conference Final. That is a strong season by any reading, and it is one round short of what Carolina did. Yet Montreal sits eleven or twelve spots ahead of the champion on the lists published this summer.
The reason is that an off-season ranking is a forecast dressed as a verdict. It weighs what changed. Montreal locked Ivan Demidov into an eight-year extension at a $9.125 million cap hit that does not start until 2027-28, and it did so with a 20-year-old coming off 62 points in 82 games. That is a roster getting better while staying cheap, which is the single thing these lists respond to most.
Carolina, by contrast, did comparatively little after winning. It went 16-3 in the postseason and beat Vegas in six games, then lost Frederik Andersen to Edmonton and made few additions of consequence. The Hockey News ranked the summer, not the season, and the summer was quiet.
Toronto is the control case
If direction is what these lists price, Toronto is the test of it. The Maple Leafs finished 32-36-14 and last in the Atlantic, and ESPN’s June panel put them 24th. Then John Chayka’s first summer brought in Sergei Bobrovsky, Darren Raddysh on an eight-year sign-and-trade, Nick Paul, Jack Roslovic and Gavin McKenna with the first overall pick, and by early July both the Associated Press and Daily Faceoff had Toronto among the off-season’s winners.
Same roster core, same last-place finish, opposite verdicts six weeks apart. Nothing on the ice changed in between.
Where the market disagrees with all of it
The futures board is the one list built to be wrong as rarely as possible, and it does not share the enthusiasm. Montreal is quoted around +2250, roughly tenth. Carolina is priced as a genuine contender in the +650 to +800 range despite its 16th-place off-season ranking. Toronto sits anywhere from +3000 to +6000 depending on the shop.
The pattern is consistent: panels move fast on a young team that just outperformed, books move slowly on anything that happened in a small playoff sample. A conference final is 19 games. A book pricing Montreal at +2250 is saying it will need more than 19 games of evidence.
Neither approach is wrong. But if you are reading a fourth-place ranking as a statement about how good Montreal is right now, read the price next to it, then decide which one is describing the roster and which one is describing the spring.
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