Maple Leafs 2026-27 Predictions: Fourth in the Atlantic Is Too Generous

The Maple Leafs 2026-27 predictions are in, and they are polite

The Hockey News has published its season preview magazine, and the Maple Leafs 2026-27 predictions inside it place Toronto fourth in the Atlantic Division — behind Tampa Bay, ahead of Buffalo, and squarely in the wild-card conversation. The magazine also projects Auston Matthews for another 40-goal season. It is a reasonable forecast made by people who watch a lot of hockey, and we think it is a shade too kind.

Not wildly so. Fourth in the Atlantic is not a homer pick. But it treats a 78-point team as though a busy summer automatically returns it to respectability, and the gap between where Toronto finished and where fourth place lives is larger than the roster changes account for.

Start with what actually happened last season

Toronto went 32-36-14. Seventy-eight points. Eighth in the Atlantic — last — and 15th in the Eastern Conference. The goal differential was minus-46. It was a franchise-record 30-point collapse from the previous season's 52-26-4, and it cost Brad Treliving and Craig Berube their jobs.

Those numbers are worth sitting with, because the offseason narrative has been so busy that the baseline has quietly gone missing. Toronto was not a good team that had bad luck. It was a team that gave up goals at a rate that put it in the league's bottom tier, lost its best playmaker to Vegas, and then lost most of its defensive core to injury. Three separate failures, compounding.

To finish fourth in the Atlantic, Toronto probably needs somewhere in the range of 95 to 100 points. That is a jump of roughly 20 points. Twenty-point improvements happen — Toronto itself has done it in reverse — but they usually require either elite goaltending, a healthy season from a star who missed time, or a genuine influx of top-six talent. Toronto has partial claims on the first two and essentially none on the third.

What the magazine gets right

The Matthews projection is fair. Matthews scored 40 or more four times before last season's interrupted campaign, and there is no evidence his shot or his release has declined. If he plays 75 games he scores 40. The forecast is really a health forecast, and the magazine is betting on health.

The structural improvements are real too. Colton Sissons, Teddy Blueger, Nick Paul and Jack Roslovic did not arrive to score. They arrived to make the middle of the lineup harder to play against, and last season's Leafs were miserably easy to play against once you got past the first line. Chayka identified the correct problem.

And the goaltending is materially better on paper. Anthony Stolarz has been named the starter, with Sergei Bobrovsky behind him on a three-year deal. A tandem that shared a Cup in Florida is a meaningful upgrade over what Toronto ran out for most of last season.

What the magazine underweights

Three things.

First, the blue line has not been fixed. Morgan Rielly, Jake McCabe, Darren Raddysh and Oliver Ekman-Larsson are the same group that was on the ice for a minus-46 season, plus Emil Andrae, who is 24 and unproven in a top-four role. And Chris Tanev remains unclear six months after core muscle surgery. A projection that assumes better defensive results from broadly the same personnel is assuming coaching solves it. Sometimes it does. It is not a plan.

Second, the age curve is unhelpful. John Tavares is 36. Bobrovsky turns 38 this month. Tanev is 36. Ekman-Larsson is 35. Rielly is 32. We covered this in detail in our look at the bridge Chayka has built out of veterans, and the risk is not that any one of them collapses — it is that in an 84-game season the odds that none of them does are poor.

Third, the Atlantic did not get easier. Florida remains Florida. Tampa is still Tampa. Ottawa and Montreal are both further along than Toronto in the parts of a roster that age well. Toronto has to climb over teams that are also improving, which we walked through in why the road back is harder this year.

The McKenna variable cuts both ways

Gavin McKenna is the wild card every projection has to price, and most of them price him too high or too low.

The high version: a generational winger walks in, plays with Matthews, produces 60-plus points, and adds four or five wins to the ledger by himself. It has happened. Connor Bedard, Macklin Celebrini and Matvei Michkov all made immediate impacts, and McKenna arrived with a louder scouting consensus than any of them.

The low version is more common and less discussed. Eighteen-year-old forwards typically face heavy defensive assignments they are not ready for, get sheltered, and produce at a rate that helps a team's future rather than its standings position. A rookie season of 45 points from a first overall pick is a success story and worth roughly nothing to a team fighting for a wild card in March.

Toronto has to plan for the second version and hope for the first. The organization's decision about McKenna's nine-game window and entry-level slide will tell you which one the front office actually believes in.

The 84-game schedule is a hidden tax

One more factor most preseason projections have not priced properly: the season is longer now. The new collective bargaining agreement moves the NHL to an 84-game schedule, and two extra games do not sound like much until you consider who is playing them.

Two additional games is roughly a 2.4 per cent increase in workload spread across a roster whose most important players are already the ones who miss time. For a young, deep team it is a marginal change. For a club leaning on a 36-year-old centre, a 38-year-old goaltender, a 36-year-old shutdown defenceman and a captain who has not completed a full schedule since 2016-17, it is a compounding risk. We worked through the specifics in our look at what 84 games does to an aging core.

It also raises the point total needed to make the playoffs. A wild-card line that used to sit in the mid-90s drifts upward when everyone plays two more games, which means the improvement Toronto needs is slightly larger than the raw comparison to last season suggests.

Our number

We would put Toronto at 88 to 92 points, sixth in the Atlantic, in the wild-card race into March and short at the end. That is not pessimism dressed up as analysis — it is what happens when you take a 78-point team, credit it fully for better goaltending and a deeper bottom six, and then subtract for an unchanged blue line and an aging core.

It is also worth noting the betting market broadly agrees with us rather than with the magazine. Toronto opened around 19th in Stanley Cup odds, which is a bubble team's price, not a fourth-place team's.

What would change our mind

One thing, mostly: five-on-five defence. If Toronto is a top-12 team in expected goals against by American Thanksgiving, the entire projection moves and fourth place is live. Jim Hiller's structural installation in camp is the mechanism, and it is the single most important thing happening at Ford Performance Centre this month.

The secondary trigger is Matthews playing 78 games. He has not played a full schedule since his rookie year. A healthy Matthews at 50 goals changes the math on his own, and it also changes the contract conversation waiting at the end of the runway.

What's next

Camp opens Sept. 17. Preseason starts Sept. 19 with split-squad games in Montreal. The season begins Sept. 29 against the Canadiens at Scotiabank Arena, a fixture that already carries more weight than an opener should given how far apart these teams finished last season.

Predictions in September are entertainment. The useful part is knowing what would have to be true for them to land. For the Leafs, fourth place requires the defence to be better without new defencemen. Believe that and the magazine is right. We do not, yet.