The Countdown: Looking at every team's best season in the NHL

As the Tampa Bay Lightning showed us this year, regular-season success, even on a historic level, doesn’t guarantee immortality. No one will ever include the 62-win Bolts from 2018-19 in discussions of the “best NHL team ever.” Same goes for the 1995-96 Detroit Red Wings, who share the wins record with Tampa. Neither team finished the job with a Stanley Cup.

The elite tier of our best-peak-season ranking thus includes teams that stuffed the stat sheet in the regular season and won a championship. They pretty much achieved hockey perfection. The game’s greatest dynasties live here.

The next group includes teams that didn’t necessarily sustain dominance throughout the entire season but put it all together when things mattered. The 2011-12 Los Angeles Kings, for instance, barely made the playoffs as a No. 8 seed yet lost just four times in the playoffs.

Beneath the winners: teams that accomplished memorable things in the regular season without winning the Stanley Cup. For franchises with no championships, these years qualify as their best. The Florida Panthers will always have that ’96 playoff run.

Other criteria factoring into these rankings: star power, Hall of Famers and, for selections before 2013-14, rankings from our Greatest Teams of All-Time collector’s edition were honored.

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