Which NHL Teams Have Won the Most Stanley Cups?

The Montreal Canadiens have won the most Stanley Cups, with 24 — nearly twice as many as anyone else. The Toronto Maple Leafs are second with 13 and the Detroit Red Wings third with 11. Twenty-two of the NHL's 32 current franchises have won at least one.

Here is the complete list, followed by why the top of it looks the way it does and why no team is likely to catch Montreal.

Most Stanley Cups by Franchise

Cups and Final records below are all-time and include the pre-NHL years for the one team it affects (Montreal, whose first Cup came in 1916). "Finals" counts Stanley Cup Final series played; the record column is wins-losses in those series.

Montreal's 35 Finals include the 1919 series against Seattle, which was abandoned mid-series during the Spanish flu pandemic with no winner declared — so the Canadiens have 34 decided Finals and a 24–10 record in them. Every other team's Finals total equals its wins plus losses.

Franchise moves are folded in, the way the NHL counts them. Colorado's three include nothing from its Quebec Nordiques years (1979–95), because the Nordiques never reached a Final. Dallas's one Cup is the 1999 title; its four losses include two from the Minnesota North Stars era (1981 and 1991). Calgary's total starts after the Atlanta Flames moved north in 1980. Carolina's three Finals all came after the Hartford Whalers relocated in 1997.

The complete year-by-year record is at List of Every Stanley Cup Winner by Year, and the ten teams missing from the table above are covered in Which NHL Teams Have Never Won a Stanley Cup?.

Montreal's 24 — and Why Nobody Is Catching Them

The Canadiens have 24 Stanley Cups. The next-closest active franchise, Toronto, has 13 and last won in 1967. To catch Montreal from where the current field sits, a team would need something like a 12-title run — and nothing in the modern NHL makes that plausible.

Three things built Montreal's number, and all three are gone.

A structurally smaller league. Montreal won 10 Cups in the 25 seasons of the Original Six era (1942-43 through 1966-67), when a team needed to beat only two opponents in the playoffs rather than four. Fifteen of Montreal's 24 came between 1956 and 1979.

Territorial rights over Quebec. Until the NHL's universal amateur draft arrived in 1969, the Canadiens could sponsor junior teams and effectively claim the best French-Canadian players before anyone else. Jean Béliveau, Maurice and Henri Richard, Jacques Plante, Guy Lafleur and others came up through that pipeline. The draft ended it.

No salary cap. The hard cap the NHL adopted for 2005-06 puts every team under the same ceiling, with no luxury-tax workaround. Championship rosters get picked apart in free agency, every summer, by design.

The result: the Canadiens have not won since 1993, and their record is now less a ranking than a museum piece. Montreal's five straight Cups from 1956 to 1960 is still the longest championship streak in NHL history, and no team has won even three in a row since the Islanders' four straight ended in 1983.

How the Original Six Era Distorts the List

Between 1942-43 and 1966-67 the NHL had exactly six teams: Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, Boston, Chicago and the New York Rangers. Four of the six made the playoffs each spring, and the champion had to win only two best-of-seven rounds.

Those 25 seasons produced 25 Cups, split like this:

Nineteen of the 25 went to Montreal and Toronto alone. That single quarter-century accounts for 42 percent of Montreal's total and 69 percent of Toronto's, and it is the main reason the top three of the all-time list is frozen in place. Today a champion needs to survive four best-of-seven rounds out of a 16-team field, so a modern Cup is a much harder thing to win than a 1950s one — the raw counts do not adjust for that.

Toronto's 13 — and the Drought Since 1967

The Maple Leafs are second all-time with 13 Cups, and they have not won any of them recently. Toronto's last championship came in 1967, the final season of the Original Six era, and the franchise has not even reached a Stanley Cup Final since.

That is now 58 completed seasons without a title (the count skips 2004-05, when the season was cancelled), the longest Cup drought in NHL history. Toronto passed the previous record — the Rangers' 54 years between 1940 and 1994 — in 2021.

Two of Toronto's 13 came under different names: the franchise won as the Toronto Arenas in 1918 and the Toronto St. Patricks in 1922 before Conn Smythe renamed it the Maple Leafs in 1927. Nine of the other 11 came during the Original Six era, most of them under Punch Imlach and, before him, Hap Day.

Cups Won by Franchises That No Longer Exist

The NHL era has produced 107 champions since 1917-18. Current franchises account for 100 of them; the other seven belong to clubs that no longer exist.

The original Ottawa Senators are not connected to the current Ottawa Senators, who entered the league as an expansion team in 1992 and have never won. The Victoria case is the one people get wrong most often: after the WCHL folded in 1926, a Detroit group bought the rights to many Victoria players and named its new NHL expansion club the Detroit Cougars in tribute. The players moved; the championship did not. Detroit's 11 Cups all start in 1936.

A further 20-odd Cups from 1893 to 1917 belong to clubs like the Montreal Victorias, the Ottawa Silver Seven, the Montreal Wanderers, the Quebec Bulldogs, the Vancouver Millionaires and the Seattle Metropolitans, none of which exist today.

Most Cups in the Expansion Era

The NHL doubled from six teams to 12 in 1967. Counting every Cup since — 58 of them across the 1967-68 through 2025-26 seasons — the leaderboard reshuffles, but not as much as you might expect:

Montreal still leads even after the Original Six era is stripped out. Narrow the window further and the parity shows up: in the 32 seasons played since 1994, 16 different franchises have won, and the most any of them has managed is Detroit's four.

Carolina's Total After 2026

The Hurricanes won their second Stanley Cup in June 2026, beating Vegas 4-2 in the Final, 20 years after their first in 2006. That moves Carolina into a tie with Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Florida on two, and gives the franchise a 2–1 record in Finals (its only loss came to Detroit in 2002).

None of that includes the Hartford Whalers years. The franchise played in Hartford from 1979 to 1997 and never reached a Stanley Cup Final there, so all three of Carolina's Final appearances have come since the move to Raleigh.

Rod Brind'Amour, who captained the 2006 team and coached the 2026 one, became the first person since Toe Blake in 1956 to win the Cup as a player and later as head coach for the same franchise. Carolina captain Jordan Staal won the Conn Smythe Trophy at 37, the oldest winner ever.

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

FAQ

Which NHL team has the most Stanley Cups? The Montreal Canadiens, with 24. Toronto is second with 13, Detroit third with 11, and Boston and Chicago are tied for fourth with six each.

How many of Montreal's 24 Cups came before the NHL existed? One. The Canadiens won the Cup in 1916 as a National Hockey Association club, a year before the NHL was founded. The other 23 came in the NHL era, the last of them in 1993.

How many NHL teams have won the Stanley Cup? Twenty-two of the 32 current franchises. Three defunct franchises also won NHL-era Cups: the original Ottawa Senators, the Montreal Maroons and the Victoria Cougars.

Which team has the best record in Stanley Cup Finals? Among teams with more than one appearance, the Colorado Avalanche are 3–0. The New York Islanders (4–1) and Pittsburgh Penguins (5–1) also have only one loss apiece. Boston has the worst mark of any multiple winner at 6–14.

When did Toronto last win the Stanley Cup? In 1967. That is 58 completed seasons ago and the longest championship drought in NHL history — the Maple Leafs have not returned to a Final since.

Do relocated teams keep their championships? Yes. The NHL treats a relocated club as the same franchise, so Dallas keeps the Minnesota North Stars' history, Calgary keeps Atlanta's, Colorado keeps Quebec's and Carolina keeps Hartford's. The championship years travel with the franchise.

How does this compare with other leagues? The Canadiens' 24 is the highest championship total in the four North American major leagues. For the equivalents, see Which NBA Teams Have Won the Most Championships and Which NFL Teams Have Won the Most Super Bowls.

What does a team actually get for winning? The trophy itself stays in the champion's possession until the next Final, with rules covered in Who Keeps the Stanley Cup After the Final - The Trophy's Rules, Explained. The money side is in How Much Money Does the Stanley Cup Winner Get.