The Rangers have the hardest schedule in the 2026-27 NHL season and the Golden Knights have the easiest. The gap between them is 4.19 expected goals across all 84 games — one extra goal every 20 games. Strength of schedule is real, measurable, and much smaller than the way people draft on it.
Here is every team, ranked. Positive means a harder draw than a balanced schedule would have given them.
The schedule column is opponent expected-goal differential per game. For skaters is only the defensive half — how soft the defenses you have to score on are, so a plus is good for your forwards. For goalies is the other half — how dangerous the attacks your goalie faces are, so a plus is bad. The three do not have to agree, and for several teams they do not.
How is strength of schedule calculated?
Take every game on a team's 2026-27 schedule, look up what each opponent did last season, and average it. The version here uses expected goals rather than standings points, because a team that banked its points on the back of a hot goalie is not the same opponent in 2026-27 as one that earned them at even strength. Our expected-goals model grades every shot on where it came from and how it was taken.
Then comes the part almost every published strength-of-schedule table gets wrong.
A team never plays itself. The Avalanche were the best team in hockey by expected goals last season at +0.828 per game, and the only team in the league that never has to face them is the Avalanche. The other 31 teams split that burden between them, and they do not split it evenly. That single fact means the raw version of this metric is mostly measuring how good you are, upside down. Across the league, raw opponent strength correlates −0.73 with a team's own strength — strong enough that you could reconstruct most of the standings from a schedule table that is supposed to be about opponents.
So the number in the table above is not raw opponent strength. It is opponent strength minus what a perfectly balanced draw from the other 31 teams would have looked like for that specific team. After the correction the correlation with a team's own quality falls to −0.23, which is roughly what an honest schedule metric should look like: mostly noise, with a little real structure left over.
If a strength-of-schedule ranking you see elsewhere has the league's worst teams clustered at the "hardest schedule" end, that is the confound, not a finding.
Why does every Eastern team have a harder schedule?
Because the East was better last season, and 52 of your 84 games are against your own conference.
The split this season is total. All 16 Eastern teams rank ahead of all 16 Western teams — the Senators, last in the East at +0.0020, still sit above the Blackhawks at +0.0014.
The Metropolitan is the engine of it. Its teams were the league's strongest by expected goals last season, so everyone in it spends 28 games beating on each other, and the rest of the East picks up the overflow. The Pacific, at −0.105 per game, does the reverse: it is why the easiest schedules in the league are almost all Western.
This matters a little more than it used to. Each team now plays every divisional rival four times — 28 of the 84 games, up from 26 — so the division you are in has a slightly firmer grip on your season than it did under the old lopsided format.
How much is strength of schedule worth in fantasy?
Less than you would guess, and the honest answer is the reason this post exists.
For a fantasy skater, only half of the schedule metric applies. You do not benefit from your opponents being bad at scoring; you benefit from them being bad at preventing it. On that half, the distance from the softest slate in the league to the toughest is 1.71 expected goals — for an entire team, over an entire 84-game season.
Spread that across a roster and a first-line forward's share of it is a fraction of a point. It will not move him a round. It will not move him five picks. Every full-season total on our fantasy projections already carries the schedule adjustment, and it is one of the smallest inputs in the model for exactly this reason.
The goalie side is bigger, at 3.04 expected goals between the toughest and softest slates of attackers, because attack quality varies more across the league than defensive quality does. The Avalanche draw the league's gentlest set of shooters; the Maple Leafs the roughest. That is still under four goals over a season — worth a tiebreaker between two goalies you already rate the same, not worth reaching for.
If you want the schedule factor that does change your draft, it is not who a team plays. It is how many games they play in a week and on which nights, which we counted out in the 84-game season: games per week, off-nights and back-to-backs.
Which teams face the most tired opponents?
Here is the part of the schedule nobody ranks, and it is worth more than opponent quality.
A team playing the second half of a back-to-back is a genuinely worse team that night. Across 2,622 team-games last season:
The tired team creates 0.200 fewer expected goals and allows 0.060 more — a swing of 0.260 expected goals per game, roughly five times the per-game gap between the league's hardest and easiest full-season schedules. And unlike opponent quality, you know in advance exactly which nights it lands on.
The Canadiens catch an opponent on the back half of a back-to-back 19 times. The Maple Leafs and Jets do so only five times. At 0.260 expected goals a night, that fourteen-game difference is worth about 3.64 expected goals over the season — more than the entire skater-side opponent-quality spread in the section above.
The same table has the other side of it. The Penguins play 15 back-to-backs of their own; the Flames and Golden Knights play eight. That is a starting-goalie question more than a skater question — a team with 15 back-to-backs has 15 nights where the backup is in play, which is why we publish projected starts rather than raw save numbers.
None of this is skill. It is a scheduling artifact, it changes completely every year, and it is the most useful thing in this entire post.
Which teams have the easiest opening stretch?
The season-long number is a poor guide to October and November. Across the league it correlates only 0.25 with the first 25 games, so a team can sit mid-table for the year and still open soft or brutal.
The Hurricanes are the clearest example: 14th in full-season difficulty, but the softest opening 25 games in the league at −0.1623. The Predators run the other way at +0.1593.
For a season-long league this is close to irrelevant — it evens out by March. For a head-to-head league where the early weeks decide your playoff seeding, and for anyone streaming the first month, it is the more useful of the two columns.
Frequently asked questions
Which NHL team has the hardest schedule in 2026-27?
The Rangers, at +0.0231 expected goals per game harder than a balanced schedule. The Islanders, Maple Leafs and Blue Jackets follow. All 16 Eastern Conference teams have harder schedules than all 16 Western Conference teams this season.
Which NHL team has the easiest schedule in 2026-27?
The Golden Knights, at −0.0268. The Oilers and Avalanche are next. All eight easiest schedules belong to Western Conference teams.
How much does strength of schedule matter in fantasy hockey?
Very little. The difference between the league's softest and toughest slate of opposing defenses is about 1.71 expected goals for an entire team across 84 games, which works out to a fraction of a point for any individual skater. It is worth a tiebreaker between two similar players and nothing more. Games per week and opponent fatigue both matter more.
How is NHL strength of schedule calculated?
Average the expected-goal differential of every opponent on a team's schedule, then subtract what a balanced draw from the other 31 teams would have been for that team. The subtraction is essential: because no team plays itself, raw opponent averages correlate −0.73 with a team's own strength and mostly measure the wrong thing.
Does playing a team on a back-to-back really matter?
Yes, and by more than opponent quality does. Teams on the second half of a back-to-back created 0.200 fewer expected goals and allowed 0.060 more per game last season, a 0.260 swing. The Canadiens draw 19 such opponents this season; the Maple Leafs and Jets draw five.
Does strength of schedule change during the season?
The opponents do not, but their quality estimates do. This page grades opponents on last season's expected goals, which is the only complete picture available in September. Once 2026-27 games are played, the live team pages and the projections update on current-season form, and a schedule that looked hard in September can look soft by December.
Where these numbers come from
Opponent quality is every unblocked shot from the 2025-26 regular season, graded by the Heater expected-goals model and expressed per game. The schedule is the league's published 2026-27 slate as it stands today. Back-to-backs are counted from the calendar — any game on the day after that team's previous game, home or away.
Every number on this page is computed rather than quoted, and the script that builds it fails rather than publishes if the shape of the answer changes. The 2026-27 fantasy draft kit has the forward, defense, goalie and category boards that use it.