PuckCast Edge
Every pick is free. The Edge is the rest.
Betting edges, stake sizing, props priced against the line, fantasy tiers and the graded ledger. $14.99 a month in season, or $99 for the year.
PuckCast Edge
Betting edges, stake sizing, props priced against the line, fantasy tiers and the graded ledger. $14.99 a month in season, or $99 for the year.
2026-27 projection
Each of 20,000 simulated seasons plays out every player’s year and asks who finished on top — so these are how often a player wins, not a ranking of who is best. Three of the four carry a percentage. One deliberately does not.
| Odds | Player | Pos | Proj. pts |
|---|---|---|---|
| 38.7% |  Connor McDavid | C | 127 |
| 13.4% |  Nathan MacKinnon | C | 108 |
| 6.7% |  Nikita Kucherov | R | 100 |
| 6.4% |  Macklin Celebrini | C | 99 |
| 4.6% | Leon Draisaitl | C | 95 |
| 3.2% |  David Pastrnak | R | 92 |
| 2.8% |  Tim Stützle | C | 90 |
| 2.6% |  Nick Suzuki | C | 90 |
| 2.2% |  Mitch Marner | R | 87 |
| 1.9% |  Jason Robertson | L | 86 |
| 1.5% | Mikko Rantanen | R | 85 |
| 1.3% |  Jack Hughes | C | 84 |
The Hart is a vote for most valuable player, and the model reaches it through scoring, which is a proxy rather than the thing itself. Tested against sixteen seasons it beat the obvious baseline by less than one percent — a margin that survived only 43% of resamples, which is a coin flip. So this is an ordering of contenders and deliberately not a set of percentages.
| Rank | Player | Pos | Proj. pts |
|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Connor McDavid | C | 127 |
| #2 | Nathan MacKinnon | C | 108 |
| #3 | Nikita Kucherov | R | 100 |
| #4 | Macklin Celebrini | C | 99 |
| #5 | Leon Draisaitl | C | 95 |
| #6 | David Pastrnak | R | 92 |
| #7 | Tim Stützle | C | 90 |
| #8 | Nick Suzuki | C | 90 |
| #9 | Mitch Marner | R | 87 |
| #10 | Jason Robertson | L | 86 |
| #11 | Mikko Rantanen | R | 85 |
| #12 | Jack Hughes | C | 84 |
| Odds | Player | Pos | Proj. pts |
|---|---|---|---|
| 29.7% | Cale Makar | D | 84 |
| 19.8% |  Quinn Hughes | D | 78 |
| 17.0% | Lane Hutson | D | 77 |
| 15.5% | Evan Bouchard | D | 76 |
| 6.2% |  Rasmus Dahlin | D | 68 |
| 5.5% |  Zach Werenski | D | 67 |
| 2.5% |  Adam Fox | D | 61 |
| 0.8% |  Matthew Schaefer | D | 55 |
| 0.7% | Jake Sanderson | D | 54 |
| 0.4% |  Moritz Seider | D | 52 |
| 0.4% | Miro Heiskanen | D | 51 |
| 0.2% |  Josh Morrissey | D | 48 |
Worth knowing what this column can and cannot do. Projected save percentages across the whole contending field span about ten thousandths — that is genuinely how narrow the gap between NHL goalies is — and measured against what goalies actually went on to post, the model beats a flat league average by 0.00008. Single-season save percentage is mostly noise, and no model removes it. What it does beat, clearly, is what people actually use: last season’s number by 32% and a career average by 18%. Small real differences are still enough to rank with, which is why this held up against the baseline — but it is a ranking of who is slightly ahead, not a claim to know who is best.
| Odds | Player | Sv% | GP |
|---|---|---|---|
| 13.1% | Andrei Vasilevskiy | .904 | 55 |
| 10.4% | Connor Hellebuyck | .902 | 56 |
| 8.8% | Igor Shesterkin | .903 | 52 |
| 8.3% | Ilya Sorokin | .901 | 54 |
| 5.8% |  Logan Thompson | .902 | 46 |
| 4.8% | Jake Oettinger | .898 | 52 |
| 4.3% | Filip Gustavsson | .900 | 47 |
| 3.9% | Jeremy Swayman | .898 | 49 |
| 3.2% |  Juuse Saros | .895 | 56 |
| 2.6% | Linus Ullmark | .898 | 44 |
| 2.5% |  Darcy Kuemper | .897 | 46 |
| 2.2% |  Karel Vejmelka | .893 | 53 |
Every award was replayed against the last ten completed seasons and scored against the NHL’s own three finalists, next to a baseline built from last season’s finishing order. The Norris put the eventual winner in its top three in 60% of those seasons against the baseline’s 30%; the Vezina, 40% against 10%. Where the margin did not hold up under resampling, the award is shown as a ranking instead of a percentage.
The Art Ross and Hart lists are the same names in the same order, and that is not an oversight: the model reaches both through scoring. For the Art Ross that is the award itself. For the Hart it is a proxy, and the fact that the identical computation earns a percentage for one and not the other is the clearest measure on this page of the gap between leading the league and being its most valuable player.
There is no Calder here. Not modelled and not modellable with this data. The Calder goes to a rookie, a rookie has no NHL history by definition, and there is no row in the corpus to project. This is a structural limit, not a gap to fill later.