Now that most roster depth charts are set and any changes outside of trades will be fairly inconsequential, I thought I'd enter all the players into my google sheets for each team roster and see how teams line up compared to this time last year.

This week is a little light in terms of writing and heavy on each team's depth charts.

I use my player game ratings (www.playergameratings.com) and enter the ratings for each player from 2024-25 only. For goalies I've put them all at 6.4 for every goalie on every team.

I've only updated the Western Teams on my sheet which you can find Here. I will update the Eastern Teams sometime during this week.

If you're not familiar with my game ratings, they start with a base of six and are calculated on various available stats. They can be used on a game, week, season or career basis as well as team.

Here are the rankings below which show where each team was at in September of 2024. As I mentioned, the goalie ratings are set at 6.4 for everyone and the table below shows the average rating for each team at forward, center and defense as well as the team average. All details and rosters are available on the above link to the google sheet to view.

Keep in mind that the ratings are a snapshot of what has been done, not necessarily what will come to be.

As we can see, Vancouver, Nashville and Seattle were ranked fifth, sixth and seventh and all missed the playoffs in 2024-25. Winnipeg was ranked 9th and won the President's Trophy.

To be fair to the rankings, there isn't much separation between 3rd to 12th on the ranking for 2025-26 or 2024-25 and an injury or sub-par campaign from a relied upon player can have drastic effects. The NHL is so competitive that teams can slide up and down these lists pretty easily.

I want to focus on the team rankings for 2025-26 in the Western Conference. Just a reminder that all goalies for each team are the same to start the year.

Because the ratings are based on the actual 2024-25 campaign, improvement and decline will happen in 2025-26.

Teams that should challenge for the Stanley Cup:

Colorado (ranked 1st)