- Connor McDavid opens as the Hart Trophy favorite at +275 for 2026-27
- Nathan MacKinnon and Nikita Kucherov both sit at +400 on the board
- Read below for the full top 10 and why Macklin Celebrini is the sleeper
The MVP race for 2026-27 starts and ends in the same place it usually does.
Matt Larkin of Daily Faceoff put Connor McDavid at No. 1 on his top 10 Hart Trophy candidates for the coming season, and the sportsbooks agree. McDavid opens at +275 at bet365, the shortest price on the board by a comfortable margin.
What sticks out in Larkin’s write-up is how annoyed he still is about last June. McDavid led the league in scoring and carried an Oilers team that lost Leon Draisaitl for 17 games, then finished behind Nikita Kucherov in the voting.
He owns five Ted Lindsay Awards, tied for the most ever, against three Harts. The players keep voting for him. The writers keep finding someone else.
Nathan MacKinnon lands second at +400 after leading the NHL in goals. He has been a Hart finalist five times in the past nine seasons, he has topped 22 minutes a night four years running, and he has missed a grand total of five games over the past three seasons.
Macklin Celebrini is third, and he is the one Larkin says he would actually bet. The 20-year-old put up 115 points and finished fourth in last season’s Hart vote on a team that missed the playoffs.
That last part is the hurdle. Nobody has won the Hart on a non-playoff team since Mario Lemieux in 1987-88, so San Jose has to get in for Celebrini to have a real case. He is all but certain to wear the C when camp opens.
Kucherov, the defending winner, slots fourth at +400. Larkin’s read is that back-to-back Harts will be tough for a player who is elite at one end of the ice and ordinary at the other, and Tampa still has to sort out his next contract.
Here is the full top 10 with the bet365 numbers:
- 1. Connor McDavid, C, Oilers (+275)
- 2. Nathan MacKinnon, C, Avalanche (+400)
- 3. Macklin Celebrini, C, Sharks (+10000)
- 4. Nikita Kucherov, RW, Lightning (+400)
- 5. Nick Suzuki, C, Canadiens (+3000)
- 6. David Pastrnak, RW, Bruins (+1200)
- 7. Auston Matthews, C, Maple Leafs (+1500)
- 8. Matthew Schaefer, D, Islanders (+10000)
- 9. Leo Carlsson, C, Ducks (+15000)
- 10. Connor Hellebuyck, G, Jets (+15000)
Schaefer is the fun one. No defenseman has taken the Hart since Chris Pronger in 1999-00, and the 19-year-old already picked up four fifth-place votes as a rookie.
Suzuki cracking the top five is earned, too. He became the third player in league history to win the Selke and hit 100 points in the same year, joining Doug Gilmour and Sergei Fedorov.
NHL Network starts rolling out its own Top 50 Players Right Now list on Sunday, so expect plenty of the same names in a different order:
Kirill Kaprizov, Cale Makar, Quinn Hughes and Jack Eichel all landed on Larkin’s honorable mention list. Given how the past two Hart votes have gone, one of them probably ends up on the ballot anyway.
