1. Buffalo Sabres
The Sabres ended a 14-year playoff drought, the longest in NHL history and won the Atlantic Division title to boot, which is the sports equivalent of coming back from the dead and immediately winning a 5K.
Why You're In: There's something special about a city that waited this long.
Why You Might Regret This: Buffalo has been the punchline of the NHL for so long that this all feels a little too good to be true.
2. Montreal Canadiens
The Canadiens are back in the playoffs for the second straight year with a young core that is actually, legitimately fun to watch, which is a sentence that hasn't been easy to write about this franchise in a while.
Why You're In: This team is kicking butt under Nick Suzuki's 100-point leadership, Cole Caufield just became Montreal's first 50-goal scorer since 1989-90, and Juraj Slafkovsky is finally delivering on all that No. 1 overall pick promise.
Why You Might Regret This: This is still Montreal, a city that once ran its coach out of town for losing a playoff series in six games, so the emotional stakes are never exactly chill.
3. Tampa Bay Lightning
The Lightning are a machine that simply refuses to be turned off, and while the dynasty days of back-to-back Cups are behind them, Andrei Vasilevskiy is still one of the most reliable goalies alive when the calendar flips to April.
Why You're In: Nikita Kucherov is one of the most creative offensive players in the sport and makes the kind of passes that make you put your drink down.
Why You Might Regret This: If you weren't a Lightning fan during the dynasty, rooting for them now is a little like showing up to a party after all the food is gone.
4. Boston Bruins
The Bruins squeezed into the playoffs as a wild card, which feels about right for a team that has made an art form out of being annoyingly relevant longer than anyone expects.
Why You're In: David Pastrnak is one of the most electric goal scorers in the game, and watching a gritty Bruins squad punch above its weight in the postseason is a time-honored tradition.
Why You Might Regret This: Somewhere around Game 3 you'll realize you've been cheering for the team everyone else in the league genuinely hates, and that says something about you now.
5. Ottawa Senators
The Senators haven't been in the playoffs since 2017 and the whole thing feels like a pressure cooker that is one game away from either a coronation or a meltdown.
Why You're In: Brady Tkachuk brings the kind of snarling, in-your-face energy that makes playoff hockey what it is.
Why You Might Regret This: Ottawa is a city that has been waiting a long time for this, which means the emotional swings of a playoff series will be felt at a frequency only dogs can hear.
6. Carolina Hurricanes
The Hurricanes finished top of the Eastern Conference and have been one of the most consistently dominant regular-season clubs in hockey for years, even if they are just a “bunch of jerks.”
Why You're In: Rod Brind'Amour runs one of the tightest, most well-coached operations in the league and his team plays a suffocating brand of hockey that is oddly satisfying to watch.
Why You Might Regret This: The Hurricanes have a habit of dominating the regular season and then making the playoffs unnecessarily stressful, so brace yourself.
7. Pittsburgh Penguins
Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang are back in the playoffs together, which at this point feels more like a farewell tour.
Why You're In: This could actually be one of the last times you watch this particular trio play playoff hockey together, and Crosby is still one of the best players to ever lace up a skate.
Why You Might Regret This: Malkin is heading into unrestricted free agency and the whole thing has a "last dance" energy that could end in heartbreak faster than you'd like.
8. Philadelphia Flyers
The Flyers ended a six-year playoff drought and Trevor Zegras, who spent years being one of the most tantalizing nearly-there players in the league, is finally getting his shot.
Why You're In: The battle of Pennsylvania against the Penguins is a first-round matchup full of bad blood and the kind of atmosphere that reminds you why playoff hockey is different from every other sport.
Why You Might Regret This: Philadelphia fans are among the most passionate, most opinionated and most vocal in North American sports, and once you root for the Flyers, there’s no going back.
9. Colorado Avalanche
The Avalanche won the Presidents' Trophy and Nathan MacKinnon set yet another new career high, which at some point stops being a statistic and just starts feeling like everyone else is playing the same game on a completely different setting.
Why You're In: This is a team that just closed the regular season on a tear, and when MacKinnon, Cale Makar and Mikko Rantanen are all locked in at the same time, buckle your seat belts.
Why You Might Regret This: The Avalanche are heavy favorites and rooting for the heavy favorite is a perfectly fine choice, but just know that everyone will assume you picked them because of exactly that.
10. Dallas Stars
Dallas has spent the better part of this decade building a team so structurally sound and defensively airtight that hockey analysts love them and casual fans completely forget they exist until the playoffs start.
Why You're In: The Stars' system is designed to make life absolutely miserable for opposing offenses and this could be the year they figure out they're allowed to just go win the thing.
Why You Might Regret This: Dallas is a football city that tolerates hockey the way you tolerate a coworker's birthday cake, so when things go sideways in the second round, you'll be grieving alone.
11. Minnesota Wild
The Wild locked Kirill Kaprizov in with an eight-year, $136 million deal, so either this is the year Minnesota finally breaks through or that contract is going to haunt every future conversation for a very long time.
Why You're In: Kaprizov is one of the most gifted and exciting players in hockey, a genuine highlight machine who makes the ice look smaller than it is.
Why You Might Regret This: Minnesota has been making the playoffs with a solid, competent, deeply unsexy roster for so long that they've basically turned first-round exits into a franchise tradition at this point.
12. Utah Mammoth
Utah is essentially the Arizona Coyotes with a new name, a new city and the sudden realization that hockey is significantly more fun when your arena holds more than 4,600 people.
Why You're In: There is nothing more fun in sports than latching onto a team in a city that is absolutely losing its mind over having a team.
Why You Might Regret This: Rooting for the Mammoth requires you to either pretend the Coyotes never existed or do a fair amount of explaining to people, and either way someone at the watch party is going to bring up Glendale.
13. Vegas Golden Knights
The Golden Knights won it all in 2023 and remain one of the league's most well-run organizations, built on the same blueprint that made them the most successful expansion franchise in North American sports history back in that magical 2017-18 run.
Why You're In: Vegas took an expansion team that was treated like a punchline and turned it into a perennial contender, which is either inspiring or deeply unfair depending on where you were born.
Why You Might Regret This: Rooting for Vegas can feel like rooting for the casino, in that the house always seems to have an edge and there is nothing charming about rooting for a team that has never known suffering.
14. Edmonton Oilers
Edmonton have been to the Stanley Cup Final two years running, losing both times to the Florida Panthers and the Oilers have spent the offseason rebuilding their defense specifically so that does not happen a third time.
Why You're In: McDavid is the best player on the planet and watching him in the playoffs is one of the few genuinely unmissable experiences in professional sports.
Why You Might Regret This: The Oilers have broken their fans' hearts in the most spectacular fashion two Junes in a row, and McDavid might have a full-blown meltdown if it happens a third time.
15. Anaheim Ducks
The Ducks spent eight years being the league's most patient rebuilding project and this is the year the young core of Cutter Gauthier, Leo Carlsson and Beckett Sennecke finally showed up to collect on all that patience.
Why You're In: Leo Carlsson, Beckett Sennecke and Cutter Gauthier are the kind of young core that makes you want to get in early before the rest of the world catches on.
Why You Might Regret This: This team went through a nine-game losing streak and a six-game losing streak in the same season and still made the playoffs, which is either a testament to their resilience or a warning about their stability,
16. Los Angeles Kings
The Kings have one of the deepest rosters and Anze Kopitar, who has been one of the best two-way forwards of his generation, is still out there doing his thing at 38 years old.
Why You're In: Los Angeles plays a mature, structured, responsible brand of hockey that is extremely well-coached and built to last deep into May.
Why You Might Regret This: The Kings are the hockey equivalent of a very good meal at a restaurant with no ambiance, which is fine, but it's hard to get truly emotionally invested.