Best Players in the Atlantic Division: Who Are the Hart Candidates in the Atlantic Division?

Players from the Atlantic Division and all over the league will begin reporting to training camps in only one week to prepare for the 2025-25 NHL season. 

There’s a lot of preparation that has to be done in the Atlantic Division for a lot of teams with high hopes. 

You’ve got the Panthers in Florida preparing for a potential three-peat this season. The Maple Leafs in Toronto are hoping to retool their roster towards real contention after the loss of Mitch Marner. For the Bruins, this upcoming year will hopefully be a bounce-back for the fans in Boston who had to endure an uncharacteristically disastrous season. 

These are only a few of the storylines in this competitive division that’s headlined by the stars on today’s list who could be contenders for the Hart Trophy, the NHL’s regular-season MVP award. 

Here are the five players in the Atlantic Division with the shortest odds to take home league MVP. 

Auston Matthews, C, Maple Leafs (+1800)

Maple Leafs captain Auston Matthews will have a lot more on his plate this season in the absence of his former teammate, Marner. 

The argument from Toronto fans last year was mainly that the distractions and frustration that Marner produced had more of an impact on the team than his offensive production. And the front office agreed. They gambled that spending money on deepening the roster makes more sense than extending an unhappy, and increasingly unpopular, superstar. 

If that gamble is to pay off, some portion of Marner’s 27 goals and 75 assists from last season have to be replaced by offensive production from Matthews. 

In years past this would’ve been an easy thing to expect from Matthews. After all, he’s already won the Hart Trophy for the 2021-22 season and has led the NHL in goal scoring three times. 

But this past year was a pretty down one for Matthews’ offense. He had the lowest year-end goal total of his career in 2024-25 and his third-lowest overall point total. 

We’ll see this year if that down year is an outlier or the beginning of a new normal for the 27-year-old.

Matthews has a good case to be made for being the best player in his conference, at least in the regular season. There definitely could be arguments made that many of his conference-mates are far more potent playoff performers than Matthews is. 

But Matthews may also now be the most important player to his team in the conference. 

In years past, any misgivings about Matthews’ performances could be hidden behind the myriad other poor performances happening elsewhere on the Maple Leafs. He still has two out of the Core Four backing him up, but the disappearance of a convenient punching bag in Marner means more of the credit or, more likely, blame will fall on Matthews’ shoulders. 

This write-up about him being a great Hart candidate has turned into somewhat of a bummer, but isn’t that the case with most discourse about Toronto recently? A good, outstanding at times, team collapsing under the incredible weight of the expectations of the league’s most foaming-at-the-mouth fanbase. 

David Pastrnak, RW, Bruins (+2800)

At +2800, David Pastrnak sits at the bottom of the top tier of Hart Trophy candidates this upcoming season. 

If you’re buying in on Pastrnak’s candidacy, it’s probably because you believe in his goal scoring. One of the league’s best snipers, Pastrnak previously led the league in goal scoring for the 2019-20 season. In the five seasons since, Pastrnak has landed in the top five of goal scoring twice. 

That scoring may return to league-best this season now that Pasta is the main or, uh, only offensive weapon on the Bruins. 

But that fact raises another critical point about Pastrnak that could fuel a broader case for him as a Hart candidate next season. He’s now one of only two players — defenseman Charlie McAvoy being the other — that’s left from Boston’s run at the Stanley Cup in 2019. Moreover, he, McAvoy, and defenseman Hampus Lindholm are the only three players left from the Bruins’ record-setting Presidents’ Trophy-winning 2022-23 season. 

It goes without saying that there has been a significant turnover in Boston’s leadership and veteran core. This year, with a blank slate from a disastrous 2024-25 season, Pastrnak has an opportunity to fill that void. 

It’s been confirmed by general manager Don Sweeney that the Bruins will not name a captain heading into the 2025-26 season and will instead look for one to develop over the course of the year. 

If Pastrnak — who should be the prohibitive favorite to come out of the year wearing a ‘C’ — cannot be that guy for Boston, then it’s a massive failure on his part. 

A world where Pastrnak does take over that crucial leadership role for the Bruins — joining the lineage of his mentors and past captains like Zdeno Chara, Patrice Bergeron, and Brad Marchand — is also one where he becomes more of a candidate for the Hart Trophy. 

If he’s checking the on-ice and off-ice boxes that are necessary to become a captain in Boston, then he’s made himself a worthy candidate to win his first MVP. 

Matthew Tkachuk, LW, Panthers (+10000)

This upcoming season will be a tricky one for Matthew Tkachuk to have a chance at winning the Hart Memorial Trophy. He has the talent, but he’ll probably lack the time needed to make a strong push at MVP.

Following a year for Tkachuk that was marred by injuries, he’s headed into 2025-26 expecting to miss two or more months of play. 

At season’s end, Tkachuk revealed that he had suffered a torn abductor muscle and a sports hernia injury all the way back at the Four Nations tournament in February. That injury caused him to miss the last 25 games of the regular season, but he decided to play through it on the Panthers’ run to a second-straight Stanley Cup. 

In August, Tkachuk had surgery to repair both injuries but told reporters that the recovery would force him to miss the first two to three months of the season. 

That old story probably has the old-timer hockey fans who quote Herb Brooks’ lines from Miracle to their son or daughter’s youth hockey teams salivating — “A bruise on the leg’s a long way from the heart.”

With his aforementioned ‘hockey-guy’ bonafides, being a two-time Stanley Cup Finals winner, and his status as, possibly, the face of the league, at least in America, Tkachuk would be a shoo-in for Hart contention without the expected missed time. 

If we’re even following the low-end of his self-reported recovery time, Tkachuk will probably miss at least 25 to 30 games this year. No non-goalie winner of the Hart Trophy has missed more than nine games, and most did not miss any. 

Surprisingly, Tkachuk has never been a major contender for the Hart Trophy given his relevance to the league over the last few years. His highest finish in the voting was for the 2022-23 season when he finished third behind Pastrnak and the eventual-winner Connor McDavid. This year probably won’t get him any better. 

William Nylander, RW, Maple Leafs (+15000)

William Nylander is a long shot to win the Hart Trophy this season, but his candidacy, and his place in the league in general, are both worth discussing.

Like his teammate Matthews, Nylander has to have enjoyed having Marner as a shield from criticism. Thinking back to the Maple Leafs’ most recent first-round flameout against Boston in 2024, the winger was able to hide from much of the blame from the series due to his injury. 

Nylander was allowed to play the role of savior in that series, if he wanted to, or if his play was unsatisfactory, he was able to excuse it by saying he was still hurt. 

Now that I think of it, Nylander has kind of been able to fly under the radar throughout the recent years of turmoil in Toronto. 

Marner was often picked on as being the soft Gen Z tennis kid. Tavares had the weight of being an underperforming captain. And Matthews was clearly the best player, but never really a good playoff one. 

In the Core Four era, Nylander has always been the one with the least criticism and the least blame. 

Now, Nylander is entering this new ‘Core Three’ era in Toronto after having a career year in 2024-25. He set a new career high with 45 goals last season. Does that translate into more expectations for the 29-year-old? And if Nylander can make his 45-goal performance more of a regular occurrence in this new era, could he be in line to become a Hart Trophy candidate? 

In the typical Maple-Leafs-ian way, where things go south, there may be a higher chance we see a trade request from Nylander than a sudden run at the Hart Trophy. After signing an eight-year contract last season, his only other way to get out of a bad situation in Toronto is through free agency in 2032, when he will be 36. 

Nick Suzuki, C, Canadiens (+25000)

Finally, Montreal’s Nick Suzuki is an even further long shot for the Hart Trophy but I’ll try to make the small case for why he could become a slight contender later in the season. 

Last year was a major maturing year for the 26-year-old captain. He had a career high point total for the team with 89, 30 goals and 59 assists, in 82 games. Last season also marked several milestones: his 300th career point, his 400th career game and his 200th career assist. 

Beyond that, Suzuki helped the Canadiens reach the playoffs for the first time in three seasons. He contributed two goals in their short-lived playoff ‘run’ where they lost to the Washington Capitals in five games. 

It was a major step up for Suzuki who could be the centerpiece of a team that Montreal fans hope is brimming with young talent. Prior to this past year, hope, was really the only thing they had from their young core. There wasn’t really a defined leader on the team or a standout player. 

But, along with Suzuki’s career year, last season also had another stellar year from forward Cole Caufield and a Calder-winning campaign from defenseman Lane Hutson. 

Maybe, though, it can be Suzuki who leads the team to another playoff berth and further into the playoffs. 

If he can keep up his point-a-game pace this upcoming season and if the Canadiens can show more maturation as a team, then Suzuki could find himself in the Hart conversation.