Which NHL Teams Have Never Won a Stanley Cup?

Ten of the NHL's 32 franchises have never won the Stanley Cup: Buffalo, Vancouver, Ottawa, San Jose, Nashville, Columbus, Minnesota, Winnipeg, Seattle and Utah. Five of those ten have reached a Stanley Cup Final and lost. The other five have never played in one at all.

The list gets shorter than people expect. Washington came off it in 2018, St. Louis in 2019, Vegas in 2023 and Florida in 2024. Here is where every franchise stands after the 2026 Final.

The Ten Teams Without a Cup

Season counts skip 2004-05, when a lockout cancelled the entire NHL season and no champion was crowned. The full year-by-year record is at List of Every Stanley Cup Winner by Year.

Tier 1: Reached a Final and Lost

Five franchises have played for the Cup and come up short. The Stanley Cup Final is a best-of-seven series, so a "4-2" below means the winner took it in six games.

Vancouver is the only one of the group with three trips, and all three ended badly: swept by the Islanders in 1982, beaten in Game 7 at Madison Square Garden by the Rangers in 1994, and shut out 4-0 at home in Game 7 by Boston in 2011.

Buffalo's 1999 loss is the one that still gets argued about. Dallas won the Cup in triple overtime of Game 6 when Brett Hull scored with his skate in the goal crease — a violation under the crease rule as it was written that season. The goal stood, the league said the rule had been interpreted differently all year, and the NHL scrapped the crease rule that summer.

The current Ottawa Senators, who joined the league in 1992, are a separate franchise from the original Ottawa Senators that won 11 Cups between 1903 and 1927 and folded in 1935. Those titles do not transfer.

San Jose, Ottawa and Nashville are one-trip franchises, and each ran into a team at the peak of its powers. Ottawa's 2007 team, built around Daniel Alfredsson, Jason Spezza and Dany Heatley, met an Anaheim side with Scott Niedermayer and Chris Pronger on the same blue line. San Jose finally broke through in 2016 with Joe Thornton and Joe Pavelski and lost to a Pittsburgh team that would win again the next year. Nashville's 2017 run was the strangest of the three: the Predators squeezed in as the West's final wild card, swept the conference's top seed, Chicago, in the opening round, and reached the Final anyway before losing to that same Pittsburgh team in six.

Tier 2: Never Reached a Final

Minnesota came closest earliest: in only its third season, the 2003 Wild won two straight series after trailing 3-1, then were swept by Anaheim in the conference final. They have not been back since, though they did reach the second round in 2026 before losing to Colorado.

The current Winnipeg Jets franchise began life as the Atlanta Thrashers in 1999 and moved north in 2011. Its one deep run came in 2018, when it lost the Western Conference Final to Vegas.

Columbus and Seattle are the only two of the ten that have never reached a conference final — the round before the Cup Final. Columbus has won exactly one playoff series in 25 seasons, the 2019 first-round sweep of a Tampa Bay team that had just tied the NHL record for regular-season wins.

Utah is the league's newest club, granted an expansion franchise in April 2024 and stocked with the players of the Arizona Coyotes, whose own franchise was suspended at the same time. The NHL treats Utah as a new team dating to 2024-25, not a continuation of the Coyotes. The Coyotes lineage — the original Winnipeg Jets, who joined the NHL from the WHA in 1979 — never reached a Cup Final either across 44 seasons in Winnipeg, Phoenix and Arizona.

The Longest Active Droughts

Not winning and never winning are different problems. Toronto has 13 Cups and is still the most tortured franchise in the league.

Toronto's 58 seasons is the longest championship drought in NHL history. The Maple Leafs won the Cup in 1967 — the last season of the six-team league — and have not reached a Final since. They passed the previous record, the Rangers' 54 years from 1940 to 1994, in 2021.

The Original Six angle sharpens it. Of the six teams that made up the entire NHL from 1942-43 to 1966-67, five have won since 1967: Montreal (1968 through 1993), Boston (1970, 1972, 2011), Chicago (2010, 2013, 2015), Detroit (1997 through 2008) and the Rangers (1994). Toronto is the only one that has not, and it is the only Original Six club that has not so much as played for the Cup in the expansion era.

The Longest-Suffering Never-Winners

Buffalo and Vancouver joined the NHL together in 1970-71 and have been waiting the same 55 seasons. They are the only two franchises in the league that have played more than 35 seasons without a title.

Buffalo's case is the harsher one. The Sabres reached the Final in their fifth season, in 1975, behind the French Connection line of Gilbert Perreault, Rick Martin and René Robert, then went 24 years before returning in 1999 with Dominik Hasek in goal. Since then the franchise went 14 straight seasons without even making the playoffs — the longest postseason drought in NHL history — before finally clinching a berth in April 2026 and reaching the second round.

Vancouver's three Finals give the Canucks the unwanted record for most Cup Final appearances without a win among active teams. Their 2011 team won the Presidents' Trophy for the league's best regular-season record and led the Final 3-2 before being outscored 9-2 across the last two games.

The New Teams, Where a Drought Means Nothing

Seattle has played five seasons and Utah two. Neither number tells you anything yet — the modern expansion track record says a young team can win fast.

Vegas entered the league in 2017-18, reached the Final in its first season, and won the Cup in its sixth. That is the quickest any expansion franchise has ever done it. Florida, by contrast, entered in 1993-94, lost the Final in its third season, and then waited until its 30th season to win, in 2024. Both of those franchises were on this page's list until recently.

Since 2018, four teams have come off the never-won list: Washington in 2018 (43rd season), St. Louis in 2019 (51st), Vegas in 2023 (6th) and Florida in 2024 (30th). Carolina came off it in 2006, nine years after the franchise moved from Hartford, and won again in 2026 — the 2026 title is covered in Which NHL Teams Have Won the Most Stanley Cups?.

The mechanics that keep the list churning are the salary cap and the draft. A hard cap since 2005-06 means no team can simply outspend the field, and the NHL draft lottery hands the best entry-level talent to the worst teams. Sixteen different franchises have won the Cup in the 32 seasons played since 1994.

This page is updated each June, after the Stanley Cup Final ends.

FAQ

How many NHL teams have never won the Stanley Cup? Ten of the 32 current franchises: Buffalo, Vancouver, San Jose, Ottawa, Nashville, Winnipeg, Minnesota, Columbus, Seattle and Utah.

Which team has been in the NHL longest without winning a Cup? Buffalo and Vancouver, tied. Both joined for the 1970-71 season and have gone 55 seasons without a title.

Which teams have never even reached a Stanley Cup Final? Five: the Minnesota Wild, Winnipeg Jets, Columbus Blue Jackets, Seattle Kraken and Utah Mammoth. Columbus, Seattle and Utah have never reached a conference final either.

Have the Toronto Maple Leafs never won a Cup? They have — 13 of them, second-most in league history. But the last came in 1967, which is the longest drought in the NHL at 58 seasons and counting.

Do the current Ottawa Senators get credit for the old Senators' Cups? No. The original Ottawa Senators won 11 Stanley Cups between 1903 and 1927 and folded in 1935. The current Senators are a 1992 expansion team with no championships and one Final appearance, in 2007.

Did Vegas lose the 2026 Stanley Cup Final? Yes, to Carolina in six games. Vegas is not on this list, though — the Golden Knights won the Cup in 2023, in their sixth season.

Who was the most recent team to win its first Cup? The Florida Panthers, in 2024, in their 30th NHL season. Before that it was Vegas in 2023 and St. Louis in 2019.

How does this compare with the NFL? Football has a similar list of long-suffering franchises — see Which NFL Teams Have Never Won a Super Bowl and Every NFL Team's Championship Drought, Ranked. For how NHL teams qualify for the playoffs in the first place, see NHL Playoff Format Explained - How Teams Qualify and Seed.