The Atlantic did not have a bad season so much as an absent one. Aleksander Barkov did not play a single game. Alex Newhook missed 40, Josh Norris 38, Thomas Chabot 25, Auston Matthews 22, Brayden Point 19, Elias Lindholm 13. Seven of the eight players below lost real time to injury, and our 2026-27 projections treat most of that missing production as recoverable. This is not a story about a division. It is a story about eight players.
The injuries are the easy part. What decides a projection is what else moved while the player was hurt. Barkov's shot volume has fallen three years running, which is why the 29 goals we give him are a bigger ask than the 51 assists. Point kept his even-strength game and lost his power play. Matthews was already shooting worse before the knee, and Norris has never played a full season in his life. Only one of these eight was healthy all year. Marco Kasper played 81 games and scored nine goals after 19 the season before, and his case rests on nothing but pucks that did not go in.
Florida Panthers: Aleksander Barkov
Florida's captain tore his ACL, missed all 82 games, and the back-to-back champions missed the playoffs without him. He answered in the spring at the World Championship in Switzerland, 11 points in 10 games for Finland, eight of them assists. That split is the whole story. He is a playmaker now, 20 goals and 51 assists in his last NHL season, with his shots falling from 3.06 a game to 2.64 to 2.22. So the 29 goals we project are the stretch. The 51 assists are not, and they ask a lower rate than he has posted in any of his last three seasons. The whole 80 comes to 0.95 a night against the 1.06 he managed before the knee, so it does not even ask for the player he was. What it does still assume is 84 games, and he has not played 80 since 2018-19.
Toronto Maple Leafs: Auston Matthews
He captained the United States to their first Olympic gold since 1980, then came home to a lost season. The 53 points do not describe it. Through 51 games before Milan he had 48, a 0.94 pace, shooting 13.5 percent. Then one goal in nine games, and on March 12 a Radko Gudas collision tore his MCL and ended his year after 13 minutes. Those nine games, one goal on 34 shots, are what dragged his season shooting to 11.9 percent. The quieter worry predates the knee: he shot 12.6 percent in 2024-25, healthy, and his shots have fallen from 4.56 a game to 3.78. Toronto never took anything away, though. His ice time has not moved in five years, 20:48 last season. We project 83, which needs 14.2 percent and 84 games from a man who has played 67 and 60 the last two years. He was shooting 13.5 before the injury.
Buffalo Sabres: Josh Norris
Norris got hurt in Buffalo's opener against the Rangers, late enough that he finished the game, and was not seen again until December 1. He came back and put up 17 points in 18 games, a 0.94 clip, then took a cross-check to the ribs against Philadelphia on January 14, left after 8:55, and did not play again until after the Olympics. Two absences, 38 games gone, and that is the shape of his whole career. We project 61, which asks less of him per night than either healthy stretch gave, 0.73 against the 0.94 he ran in December and the 0.77 he averaged overall. The caution is health and the finish. It assumes 84 games from a man who has never played more than 66, and 33 goals on 139 shots would be 23.7 percent, past the 21.9 of his best season.
Tampa Bay Lightning: Brayden Point
Point's season turned on January 12 in Philadelphia. He scored a power-play goal, then his knee buckled in a collision with Cam York and he was helped off after five minutes. Six weeks gone. Not all of it was the knee, though. He was already shooting 2.10 times a game in the 21 games before he missed one, down from 2.45, and his ice time fell from 19:29 to 18:15. Add a power play that went from 31 points to 11 and a shooting percentage that fell from 22.2 to 14.0, and 82 points became 50. What held is the part that predicts the next season: 2.68 points per 60 at five on five, 13th in the league among forwards who played 40 games. We project 75 across a full 84 games, which asks him to shoot like his career and not like his peak.
Montreal Canadiens: Alex Newhook
Newhook fractured his ankle on November 13, chasing a loose puck into the boards against Dallas, and came back 105 days later having missed 40 games. Then Montreal played him more in the playoffs than it had all year, a 16:46 median against 14:29 in the regular season, and he repaid it twice: the goal that put Tampa out in Game 7 on May 3, the overtime winner that ended Buffalo in Game 7 on May 18. Ten points in 19 games, every one at even strength. We project 42, a career high by eight. The caveat is the finish. He shot 21.3 percent last season and 21.2 in the playoffs against 14.0 for his career, with our model putting him nearly eight goals above his chances. The projection splits it at 15.7, and he starts this season as a top-six forward.
Ottawa Senators: Thomas Chabot
Ottawa lost Chabot three times, starting against Dallas on November 11 after nine shifts, and 25 games went with it. His shot volume fell to 1.74 a game, his fewest since his rookie year, but goals were never his job: seven last season, ten in our projection, with 35 assists around them. His minutes have slid four straight years too, 26:12 to 22:35, though that is Jake Sanderson climbing to 24:50 more than Chabot falling off. What Ottawa needs from him held. They allowed fewer goals with him on the ice than with any other defenseman on the roster, no Senator blocked more shots per minute, and when the games got long they could not take him off: 31:06 a night across four playoff games against Carolina, one of them 40:50. We project 45, 40 to 50, the narrowest band our model will print.
Detroit Red Wings: Marco Kasper
Kasper is the one player here who was healthy all season, and the only one whose case rests entirely on finishing. He scored on October 30 and did not score again until January 16, a 36-game drought on 50 shots, and Detroit cut his minutes to 12:27 through it. Nine goals after 19 the year before, and a finish 7.7 goals short of what our model valued his chances at, the widest gap in this article. Some of that is where he shoots from. Sixty percent of his attempts were wrist and snap shots, and those produced five goals all season, while the 41 pucks he tipped went in at 13 percent. Then it broke. Over his last 34 games he took 1.88 shots a game, exactly his 2024-25 rate, and scored 13 points, a 32-point pace across 84 games. Our 33 asks for nothing he was not doing by January.
Boston Bruins: Elias Lindholm
Lindholm's season splits in two. From his return on November 23 through late January he put up 28 points in 31 games, a 0.90 clip worth 76 across a full year. Over his last 25 he managed 11, a 37-point pace, and his minutes went up rather than down. We project 55, which lands between those halves. The case for it is not the shooting, which at 14.9 percent was already above his 12.2 career mark, and it is not the defence, where Boston allowed more expected goals with him on the ice than with any of their twelve other regular forwards. It is that the good version showed up for three months this season, at 32, and the projection only needs some of him back.
Every projection on this page, plus how often each player actually plays, sortable on the Fantasy board.
Open the Fantasy board
