Let me save you the suspense. My early pick to win the 2027 Stanley Cup is the Florida Panthers. It's not close in my head.
I know how this sounds two and a half weeks after free agency opened, with training camps still months away. This is early speculation, plain and simple. Take it as a prediction, not something carved in ice. But when a wounded contender gets healthy and goes shopping the way Florida just did, you don't wait for the odds to move. You beat the market there.
The team that lost a season to bad luck
Everybody's going to forget this by October: Florida didn't fall off. Florida got hurt. The Panthers went 40-38-4 in 2025-26 and missed the playoffs for the first time since 2019. Why? Captain Aleksander Barkov missed the entire season with a knee injury. Matthew Tkachuk, Evan Rodrigues and Carter Verhaeghe all missed significant time too.
That's not a rebuild, that's a MASH unit. Now picture that same core walking back through the door healthy. This isn't a projected leap forward, just a return to where one of the sport's best teams already was.
And then they went and got greedy
Most teams that lose a year lick their wounds. Florida attacked. This summer they traded for Brady Tkachuk, pairing him with his brother Matthew, and that move alone was enough to make the Panthers the betting favorite to win the Cup in 2027 at some books. They weren't done, either. They landed goaltender Jacob Markstrom from the New Jersey Devils in a separate blockbuster.
Health, the Tkachuk brothers on the same roster, a proven starter in net. Once Florida got its goalie, one book shortened them to +750. The market sees it. I see it.
Why the other spenders don't scare me as much
Everybody had a busy summer, because a rising cap did that. It jumped to $104 million, an $8.5 million raise from last season's $95.5 million, and the checkbooks came out.
Toronto's new GM John Chayka went all in, signing two-time Vezina winner Sergei Bobrovsky to a three-year, $7 million AAV deal after trading goalie Joseph Woll to Philadelphia, and adding Colton Sissons and Darren Raddysh. They also landed No. 1 pick Gavin McKenna. Splashy stuff. But you're betting on a first-time GM and an aging goalie to fix a franchise that hasn't fixed itself in years. I'll pass at the top of my card.
Chicago made the loudest bet of all, acquiring Bowen Byram from Buffalo mainly for the fourth overall pick and immediately handing him six years and $75 million at a $12.5 million cap hit, one of the highest-paid defensemen in hockey. You're paying for tomorrow there, not this June.
And don't sleep on the champs. Carolina just went 16-3 in the playoffs, the second-best postseason record since the league went to four rounds of best-of-sevens, trailing only the 1987-88 Oilers. They'll be right there. But defending a title is hard, and I'd rather back the hungrier team with the deeper, healthier core.
