Who Is Truly The Third-Best Team In The NHL's Pacific Division?

Robert Edwards-Imagn ImagesRobert Edwards-Imagn ImagesOct 29, 2026 6:58 PMPublished Oct 29, 2026 6:58 PMMost NHL fans accept the Edmonton Oilers and Vegas Golden Knights as by far the top two teams in the Pacific Division, but after one month of the season, is there a clear third?The good thing for most of the teams in the Pacific Division is that the NHL playoff format guarantees that three teams will make it to the post-season.The bad news is that two of those spots are spoken for. Nobody is surprised that the Edmonton Oilers and Vegas Golden Knights are off to dominant starts atop the Pacific, but almost everything else has been a bit of a shock.Take, for example, the fact that the Seattle Kraken are third in the division right now. Surely, if asked in September, you would have said that as October drew to a close, one of San Jose or Anaheim would have been in that spot instead, and that the Kraken were closer to being a basement dweller than a team with legitimate playoff chances.To be clear, that is how the Kraken are playing, putting up underlying numbers that are basically all 46 percent or less both at 5-on-5 and in all situations. The only way to explain what they did in the first month of the season is to say that their power play ran hot and their goalies were a little better than expected. Related storiesNo one can realistically say this is a team with a true shooting talent of almost 14 percent, and to prove that, one need only look at their leading scorer through 12 games: Kaapo Kakko. Let's be reasonable here.But credit to 'em, starting a little too hot is much better than the alternative, which is what the San Jose Sharks are doing. Like the Kraken, their underlying numbers also look rough, sitting bottom-three in the league in almost every category because they can't get anywhere near the net. Macklin Celebrini is having an unsurprisingly great start, but he's got a point on 15 of the Sharks' 36 goals. They're relying too much on him and because he's not quite putting up Connor McDavid numbers, the results haven't been as good.And yet, because of the various problems for other teams in the West, they're still in the playoff picture. More hockey like this will probably mean they drop out, but the teams immediately behind them are decided non-contenders.The Calgary Flames, it should be noted, just had a four-game winning streak snapped, but that brought them to a 5-7-0 record, and no one will argue too much if you want to say neither the start nor the recent hot streak are truly reflective of their quality. They just don't have the talent to meaningfully compete all season unless the percentages really start to spike, which is possible.Which leaves us with the other Pacific team still lingering around the bottom of the playoff picture: The Anaheim Ducks. Remember when these guys were the next big thing in the Pacific? Well, they haven't really shown a good process, which they also didn't last year, but got through largely on their top-end talent in spite of a poor performance by Lukas Dostal (.888). Well, Dostal has been even worse this year (.872), and the Ducks had to make so many unwanted moves this summer to make their cap numbers work that they also thinned out their depth considerably. There's still reason to believe Dostal can turn this around, and that difference-makers like Leo Carlsson, Beckett Sennecke, Cutter Gauthier, and Jackson LaCombe can get this thing pointed in the right direction, but every passing week seems to push the playoff cut line slightly farther out of reach.Again, someone has to take that third and final divisional playoff spot — surely it won't be Los Angeles or Vancouver — and be cannon fodder for whichever of Vegas and Edmonton don't finish first. But the four teams discussed here seem to be looking at one another and saying, "After you," and "No no, I insist: after you."If we're asking which of these teams are actually good, every game gives a little more evidence that maybe the answer is "none of them," but Anaheim and San Jose don't have nearly as good an excuse for a middling-or-worse start. They could turn it around, but they'd have to show us something first.For action-packed issues, access to the entire magazine archive and a free issue, subscribe to The Hockey News at THN.com/free.