How to Watch the Maple Leafs in 2026-27: No CBC, Prime Video Wednesdays

How to watch the Maple Leafs in 2026-27, and what changed

If you are working out how to watch the Maple Leafs this season, the short answer is that two of your old habits no longer work. There is no NHL hockey on CBC, for the first time since 1952. And starting Sept. 30, a chunk of the national schedule lives on Amazon Prime Video, including a Leafs game in the very first window.

This is not a small adjustment. For 74 years, the default way to watch hockey in Canada on a Saturday involved a public broadcaster that came with the antenna. That era ended on June 16, 2026, when CBC and Rogers Sportsnet confirmed they would not renew the sublicensing agreement that had kept Hockey Night in Canada on CBC through the 2025-26 season. The final CBC broadcasts were the 2026 playoffs.

Toronto opens the season against Montreal at Scotiabank Arena on Tuesday, Sept. 29 at 7 p.m. ET. Twenty-four hours later, the Leafs host the New York Islanders. That second game is the one that tells you what the new landscape looks like.

The Sept. 30 game is a Prime Video exclusive

Amazon's NHL on Prime coverage in Canada launches on Wednesday, Sept. 30 with Islanders at Maple Leafs from Scotiabank Arena. It is the Islanders' season opener and Toronto's second game, and it is the debut of Prime's Wednesday Night Hockey package.

Rogers sublicensed that package to Amazon on a 12-year agreement. Prime gets at least 26 national regular-season games a year in Canada, exclusively, in both English and French, at no extra cost to Prime members. Amazon also holds exclusive Canadian rights to two first-round Stanley Cup Playoff series and one second-round series each season.

There is a nice subplot in the opener beyond the broadcast history. Gavin McKenna, Toronto's first overall pick in the 2026 draft, and Matthew Schaefer, the Islanders' first overall pick in 2025, are scheduled to be on the same sheet of ice in Prime's first Canadian NHL broadcast. McKenna's preseason debut on Sept. 19 drew a crowd of its own, which we covered in our look at what the scoresheet missed.

Why CBC is gone: the Rogers deal is twice as big

The 2026-27 season is year one of Rogers' new national rights agreement with the NHL: 12 years, $11 billion, covering all platforms in Canada through 2037-38. The previous deal, which ran from 2014-15, was $5.2 billion over 12 years. Rogers is paying more than double, and the economics of giving inventory away to a public broadcaster stopped making sense.

That is the whole explanation. CBC did not lose a bidding war. It was a sublicensee, carrying games that Rogers owned, and Rogers decided to keep them. The arrangement had already been stripped down over the years — CBC had no editorial control and sold no advertising in the games by the end.

The knock-on effect is that the public broadcaster is now essentially out of major professional sport in Canada. Its CFL rights ended in 2007 and its Blue Jays rights expired after 2008. Hockey was the last one.

Where Leafs games actually live now

Regionally, Toronto games continue to be split between TSN4 and Sportsnet Ontario. That split survived Rogers taking full control of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, because the MLSE transaction preserved Bell's ability to keep broadcasting a set of Leafs games. We wrote about the ownership change itself when Rogers became sole owner of MLSE.

Nationally, games are on Sportsnet, with the Wednesday package on Prime Video and French-language coverage on TVA Sports. Out-of-market games stream on Sportsnet+. Regional games on TSN stream through the TSN app inside the broadcast region.

One genuine improvement: Rogers has said the new agreement includes more national games than before and fewer regional blackouts. Whether that shows up in practice is the thing to actually judge in November, not September, but the structural incentive is there — the more games Rogers can sell nationally, the less it benefits from carving the country into blacked-out regions.

The part nobody is happy about

Here is the honest assessment, and it is not a fan-friendly one. Watching every Maple Leafs game in 2026-27 now requires a cable or satellite package that carries both TSN and Sportsnet, plus a Prime membership, plus potentially a Sportsnet+ subscription for out-of-market nights. Three bills where there used to be one, and an over-the-air option that no longer exists.

Fans who cut the cord in the last few years have the worst of it. Prime Video is the cheapest addition of the three and the one most households already have, which is presumably the point of Rogers sublicensing to Amazon in the first place. It is still another login, another app, and another place to lose track of when your team is playing.

The counterargument is that the money has to come from somewhere. An $11 billion rights deal is what underwrites a salary cap that jumps to $113.5 million in 2027-28 from $104 million this season. Fans pay for that, directly, through subscriptions. It is a fair trade only if you think the product improved by the same proportion.

A practical viewing plan

For most Leafs fans in Ontario, the workable setup is a TV package carrying both TSN and Sportsnet for the regional games, plus Prime Video for Wednesdays. That covers the overwhelming majority of the 84-game schedule without a fourth subscription.

If you are outside Ontario, Sportsnet+ is the necessary piece — it carries the out-of-market games that the regional broadcasters black out where you live. If you are outside Canada entirely, the rights picture is different again and depends on your country's NHL package.

Set a reminder for the Wednesdays. The single most common way people will miss a Leafs game this season is assuming it is on the channel it is usually on. Prime's package is exclusive, which means the game is not simulcast anywhere else in Canada.

There are two more games to find this season

One more wrinkle worth knowing: the schedule itself is longer. The collective bargaining agreement that took effect on Sept. 16 expands the regular season from 82 games to 84, the first change to the length of an NHL season since 1993-94. The 2026-27 campaign runs from Sept. 29 through April 10, 2027 — 1,344 games across the league.

The two extra games are divisional. Every club now plays each of its seven division opponents four times, which for Toronto means four meetings apiece with Montreal, Ottawa, Boston, Buffalo, Detroit, Tampa Bay and Florida. That is a more hostile schedule than the old format produced, and in an Atlantic that added Brady Tkachuk to Florida over the summer, it matters. We went through the division's reshaping in our Atlantic reload breakdown.

The trade-off is at the other end of the calendar. Preseason dropped from six games to four, which is why Toronto is cramming its entire exhibition schedule into two split-squad nights against Montreal and Ottawa. Two more games that count, two fewer that do not, and more national inventory for Rogers and Amazon to sell.

What's next

Toronto finishes the preseason with a pair of split-squad games against Ottawa on Sept. 23, then submits a compliant roster by 5 p.m. ET on Sept. 28 — the timeline we broke down in our look at the final week of camp. The regular season starts the next night against Montreal.

Two games in two nights to open, on two different broadcasters, one of which did not carry NHL hockey a year ago. That is the season in miniature. Follow the results as they come in on our standings page, and the roster that produces them on the players page.

The old rhythm is gone. Saturday night hockey on a channel everyone already had was a 74-year-old Canadian institution, and it ended with a press release in June. Whatever else the new deal delivers, it will not deliver that back.