The Toronto Maple Leafs just got some brutal news for 2026-27, and it has nothing to do with the roster.
DraftKings Sports dropped its strength-of-schedule model Wednesday night, and Toronto came out with the single hardest slate in the entire NHL.
Dead last. Not top five, not top ten. Number one on the list nobody wants to top.
That ranking lands next to another number that stings just as much. Toronto finished 28th overall in the league last season.
The Maple Leafs went 32-36-14 for 78 points, got outscored 299-253, and finished a minus-46 in goal differential.
Home was survivable at 18-15-8. The road was a disaster at 14-21-6.
And the finish was uglier than the record suggests, with Toronto stumbling to a 2-7-1 mark over its final 10 games and dropping the last one 1-3 at Ottawa on April 15.
New coach Jim Hiller inherits a brutal schedule right out of the gate
Jim Hiller was hired as Toronto's head coach on June 17. He does not get a soft landing.
Most new coaches get a stretch of winnable games to find their footing. Hiller gets the opposite, a full season of the toughest road in hockey before a system is even installed.
That is not a fair deal for a coach walking into his first season behind this bench.
It is like handing someone the wheel of a car with no brakes and pointing them straight at rush hour traffic.
Colorado, for comparison, finished first overall in the league last season and still landed nearly the easiest schedule in the same model.
Toronto gets neither the cushion of last year's results nor a manageable calendar to rebuild around. Both broke the wrong way at once.
Toronto was already brutal away from home last season, and a tougher schedule tends to punish teams that cannot win on the road.
Does a harder slate make last year's problems better or worse? It is not close.
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Nothing about this schedule forces a roster move today. But if Toronto opens slow again, the questions about this coaching staff and this roster will not wait until March to show up.
Is the NHL's toughest 2026-27 schedule a fair test for a last-place Maple Leafs team?
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