Decade of Dominance: McDavid tops TSN’s Top 50 Players ranking for 10th straight year

Connor McDavid is a perfect 10.

McDavid is No. 1 on TSN’s 2026-27 list of the projected Top 50 NHL players.

That makes it 10 straight years – a full decade – for the sublimely skilled Edmonton Oiler, beginning in 2017.

It should come as no surprise.

McDavid won the 2025-26 Art Ross Trophy with 138 points and the Ted Lindsay Award as the players’ choice for best player.

He was also named to the first all-star team, bringing to 24 (!) the number of post-season honours he has received over his 11-year career.

Taking into account all trophies and all-star team berths, that’s an average of more than two per year.

Nineteen of 20 TSN voters placed McDavid first on their lists.

The only other player to receive a No. 1 vote was Hart Trophy-winning Nikita Kucherov, who led the NHL in points per game (1.71) for a third straight season.

The Tampa Bay Lightning right winger – who collected 104 points over one 50-game span last season - slots in at No. 4.

Ahead of him are No. 2 Nathan MacKinnon, the Rocket Richard winner and runner-up to McDavid for a fifth time, and No. 3 Macklin Celebrini, the 20-year-old San Jose Sharks wonderkid, who rocketed up the TSN Top 50 like nobody before him, moving up 38 places from 2025 into the top five.

MacKinnon scored a career-high 53 goals to win his first Rocket Richard Trophy in what is arguably the most fitting honour of his career.

No current NHLer embodies the spirit and skill of the legendary Montreal Canadiens captain more than the Colorado alternate captain.

Nos. 1 and 3, McDavid and Celebrini, have much in common.

They were both No. 1 overall in the draft, they were both third in Calder Trophy voting in their rookie seasons and they both raised their point totals from Year 1 to Year 2 by precisely 52 points.

The San Jose centre Shark had 15 more points than McDavid in his sophomore season, 115 compared to 100.

Celebrini had a statement season in 2025-26, leading Canada in goals at the Olympics, outpointing his closest San Jose teammate (Will Smith) by a nearly 2-to-1 margin and placing second in scoring at the World Championship as Team Canada captain.

All as a teenager.

Colorado right defenceman Cale Makar completes the top five. He’s the only active player with a year-end honour to his credit every season of his career. Makar made it seven straight in 2025-26 with a berth on the first all-star team.

Filling out the top 10 are:

• No. 6 Edmonton centre Leon Draisaitl, who scored at a 100-point pace in 2025-26 for an eighth consecutive regular season.
• No. 7 Minnesota left defenceman Quinn Hughes, who has recorded five straight 60-plus assist seasons, something only three other blueliners have ever done: Bobby Orr, Paul Coffey and Ray Bourque.
• No. 8 Boston right winger David Pastrnak, who recorded his fourth straight 100-point season in 2025-26.
• No. 9 Columbus left defenceman Zach Werenski, who earned the Norris Trophy for the first time in his career after scoring 20 goals for a third time.
• No. 10 Florida centre Aleksander Barkov, hockey’s quintessential two-way forward who missed the entire 2025-26 NHL season with a knee injury, before returning to captain Finland to the 2026 World Championship gold medal.

Not in the top 10 for the first time since debuting on the list in 2018 is Toronto centre Auston Matthews.

Matthews averaged an NHL-high 0.65 goals per game his first eight seasons but has dropped to 0.47 the past two seasons.

Just ahead of Matthews is Nick Suzuki, who crossed the triple-digit threshold for the first time with 101 points and completed his fifth straight season without missing a game.

The first goalie on the list is Tampa Bay’s Vezina Trophy-winning Andrei Vasilevskiy at No. 20. He makes the TSN Top 50 for a ninth consecutive season.

Winnipeg’s Connor Hellebuyck is the second-ranked netminder at No. 27; he has been suspended by the Jets for not reporting to training camp after formally requesting a trade.

TSN’s Top 50 Players