The Canadiens Are Canada's Last Hope
Montreal is the last Canadian NHL team standing — and the Habs have a real chance to carry the country's long-suffering Cup hopes into the conference final.
One of the strangest, most persistent storylines in sports for the past three-plus decades has been the inability of a Canadian NHL team to win the country’s most prized trophy: the Stanley Cup. As the average location of Cup winners has drifted ever southward, the memory of the 1993 Montreal Canadiens — Canada’s last champ — recedes further and further into the rearview, one empty spring at a time.
The past few years were going to be different. The Edmonton Oilers had made back-to-back Finals appearances with Connor McDavid leading the way, part of a trend where a team from north of the border skated for the Cup three times in five seasons after making it just once in the previous 13. Going into the 2025-26 season, my Elo forecast assigned Canadian teams a collective 31 percent chance to end the drought, which is quite high by the standards of recent decades.
But fast-forward to now, and the Oilers are on summer vacation, as are the Ottawa Senators and all the rest. A little over a week ago, the odds of a Canadian champion were down to 2 percent, down from a high of 33 percent in November and 14 percent on the eve of the playoffs in April.
The odds are climbing this week, though — and it’s all because of the league’s youngest team, the present-day Canadiens. With a 2-1 lead over the Buffalo Sabres in their East semifinal series, Montreal goes into tonight’s pivotal Game 4 with 9 percent odds to win the Cup, and a chance to push that figure (and, by definition, the entire country’s title odds) ever higher.
It’s not completely surprising that the Habs are carrying this banner. They were always supposed to be a breakout candidate in this, coach Martin St. Louis’ fourth full season behind the bench, with their excellent young core of Cole Caufield, Lane Hutson and Nick Suzuki at the center of everything, and netminder Jakub Dobes proving more than ready to take over as starter between the pipes. Montreal’s front office has done a great job of building a talented and deep roster of contributors, almost all of whom are under the age of 30.
The main surprise is that they’re the only one trying to do it. From the nightmare year of 2016, when zero Canadian teams made the NHL playoffs for the only time since 1970, the seven Northern clubs had gradually gotten better almost every year, collectively improving their Elo ratings and producing much better top-end teams in the process — teams good enough to win if their luck would ever turn around:
This season, though, derailed all of that momentum. The average rating for Canadian teams dropped by nearly 40 points year-over-year, which in Elo parlance was the difference this season between the Flyers (who made Round 2 of the playoffs) and the Maple Leafs (who got the No. 1 pick in the NHL draft).
While still not down in the dire depths of 2016, this year saw just three Canadian postseason entries (Montreal, Edmonton, Ottawa), with two bowing out in Round 1 and the potential for none to make it past Round 2 for just the second time since 2020.
The only team standing in the way of that fate — and the only one with any shot to end the drought — is the same one which started it all back in 1993, Les Habitants.
Despite their youth, Caufield and Suzuki have been here before: they were important players on the 2021 Canadiens squad that upset (in order) the Leafs, Jets and Golden Knights en route to the Stanley Cup Final — the furthest a Canadian team had gone since the Canucks lost the title in 2011. But back then, the Habs were a classic example of playoff-hockey flukiness, a below-average regular season team (-0.14 SRS) who got hot at the right time and rode the stellar goaltending of Carey Price to the doorstep of a championship.
The 2026 Canadiens are vastly better than the 2021 version was. With their stars now in their primes, surrounded by far superior supporting talent, and goaltending nearly as good, these Habs are actually favored to beat the Sabres from here.
After that, the powerhouse Carolina Hurricanes would await, a team that literally swept through Rounds 1-2 without losing a single game. Conditional on beating Buffalo, Montreal would only have around a 30 percent chance against the Canes — and that’s just to reach the Stanley Cup Final against, most likely, the equally nasty Colorado Avalanche. Canada’s last remaining path to a Cup in 2026 is not an especially likely one.
But unlikely is not the same thing as impossible. And this bizarre, cruel Canadian Stanley Cup drought has always been less about the absence of chances than having them… and watching each one slip away. This one belongs to Montreal for now, and it will remain theirs as long as they keep winning hockey games as convincingly as they’ve been doing recently.