When one contention window closes, another one opens. That's the NHL's circle of life, a cycle of teams oscillating between contending for the Stanley Cup and rebuilding toward their next chance.

We call it the NHL Contention Cycle, and this is Year 2 of estimating where each team currently stands within the league's tried-and-true pattern of build, rise, contend, fall, and rebuild.

How do we do that? By measuring each team's core of top players, both now and in the future, via the Player Tiers and Prospect Tiers -- two industry-sourced projects that aim to establish a hierarchy of the league's best in each category.

The idea is simple: The NHL runs on star power and the best teams are the best teams because they have the best players. It's those foundational pieces that create Stanley Cup contenders and figuring out which teams have the best collection of high-end players, now and in the future, can help inform their situation. The more Tier 1 or 2 options a team has, the better their standing.

That standing is multi-faceted, one that attempts to answer two questions simultaneously: How good is this team now and how good will it be in five years? The answer to both dictates where each team is in its contention timeline; whether its window is opening, closing or in various stages of a rebuild.

This is where each team stands going into the 2025-26 season, with arrows denoting movement since last year.

The NHL may run on star power, but no run lasts forever. It all depends on how bright and long a team's stars can shine -- and whether there's someone ready to step in and fill the future void.

When it comes to rating a team's present and future, this exercise isn't everything. Many other factors can dictate how high a team climbs. The other players on the team, the organizational prospect depth, the coach, the front office, the salary cap -- they all matter too. However, when it comes to measuring a team's ceiling, the strength of their core group matters most.

None of this is set in stone: The entire idea is that teams move within the cycle. Players and teams have the power to alter their perception and change their path. This is merely a snapshot of where each team enters the 2025-26 season, something that can be changed during the season with stronger play, better drafting, surprise breakouts and/or savvy management. The opposite is true, too.

Using that rubric, we've separated each team into nine tiers based on their place within the Contention Cycle. Here's where they land both now and in the future, which players get them there, and what their path to sustainable contention is.

You can find the methodology behind Present Rating and Future Rating at the bottom of this post.

Similar to this exercise, we compared each player's final placement in the Player Tiers project with his projected Net Rating. That led to the following valuations for each position, depending on their tier placement -- their "Tier Rating."

Those values were then added up for each team and normalized with percentiles to a scale of 0-to-10 to create their "Present Rating."

To get each team's "Future Rating," we looked at how each player from the Player Tiers (and some young players/goalies outside it) is projected to age over the next five seasons and applied that figure to their Tier Rating. We compared that number to the value for each Tier, and put each player in their corresponding future tier.

That process left us with 86 names.

With that in mind, we did the same exercise with the Prospect Tiers -- assigning a Tier Rating to each one based on where they were placed. To get the 113 prospects outside the NHL to fit into the remaining top 150 -- and to account for prospect uncertainty -- we applied a sliding probability scale to each tier.

Their Tier Ratings were added to the age-adjusted Tier Ratings of the remaining players for each team. That collective value, normalized to percentiles on a scale of 0-to-10, gave us our Future Rating.

Each team's Present Rating and Future Rating were then plotted together (as seen in the introduction), informing their place in the Contention Cycle.

The NHL Contention Cycle: Where does each team stand going into 2025-26 and in the future?