Most Stanley Cups by Team

Twenty-four. That is how many Stanley Cups the Montreal Canadiens have won, and no other franchise is within a decade of catching them. The number has not moved since 1993, yet the all-time list underneath it just changed in three straight Junes. Carolina lifted the Cup in 2026, Florida won it in both 2024 and 2025, and suddenly the busiest line on the leaderboard is not the top. It is the bottom, where two clubs climbed to a matching pair of titles. I call that churn at the foot of the table The Two-Cup Surge.

The top of this leaderboard has not moved in 33 years. Every bit of recent motion sits down at the bottom, where Carolina and Florida just rewrote the busiest tier on the list.

The full list: most Stanley Cups by team

Here is every current NHL franchise that has won at least one Stanley Cup, ranked by total titles. Where teams are tied, the most recent championship breaks the tie, so the club that won more recently sits higher. Totals count each franchise in its current identity, which matters for the relocated teams further down. The path to add a name here keeps getting harder, a grind our 16-win playoff map lays out round by round.

One counting note before anyone fires off an angry email. Montreal's 24 is the standard, official figure, counting their first title in 1916. A few sources list 23 because that earliest championship was won the year before the NHL existed, and a few stretch it to 25 by adding a pre-NHL win. The league, the Hall of Fame, and the record books use 24, so that is the number here.

The dynasties that built the top

The first three spots are a museum exhibit. Montreal's 24 came across 77 seasons, from 1916 to 1993, and included a stretch of five straight from 1956 to 1960 that no team has matched. Toronto's 13 is the strangest line on the list, because the franchise won under three different names: the Arenas in 1918, the St. Pats in 1922, and the Maple Leafs the other 11 times. Their last one came in 1967, the longest active drought of any Original Six club. And yes, Leafs fans know the year by heart.

Detroit sits third at 11, the only team in the top three to win this century, closing the book in 2008. Below them the six-Cup tier holds Chicago (last in 2015) and Boston (last in 2011), then a five-Cup pair in Pittsburgh and Edmonton. Pittsburgh's run leans modern, with two in the early 1990s and three more from 2009 to 2017, a window that ran straight through Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin's prime. Edmonton's five all came in a single white-hot decade behind Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier, then stopped cold in 1990.

The three-Cup group tells you how the map shifted south and west. Colorado's three (1996, 2001, 2022) all landed after the franchise left Quebec, a legacy that hangs over every season in Denver, including the heartbreak our Presidents' Trophy curse breakdown dug into. Tampa Bay matched them with a 2004 title and the 2020-21 back-to-back. New Jersey's trio (1995, 2000, 2003) came in the dead-puck era that the franchise more or less invented.

The Two-Cup Surge at the bottom

What makes this list interesting in 2026 sits well below the dynasties, down at the logjam at two titles, because three of the last three Finals were won by teams pushing into or through that exact tier. Florida had zero Cups before 2024, then won the next two in a row, beating Edmonton both times. Carolina had one from 2006, sat on it for two decades, and finally added the second by handling Vegas in the 2026 Final, a run our full Carolina championship recap tracked game by game. Two franchises, four of the most recent titles, both parked at two. That clustering is the Two-Cup Surge, and it is the only movement the list has seen since 2022.

"These guys are just different." — Paul Maurice on his Florida Panthers, via ESPN (2025)

What makes the surge notable is how hard the modern game makes repeating, let alone climbing. Florida joined Pittsburgh (2016-17) and Tampa Bay (2020-21) as the only back-to-back champions of the salary-cap era, which began in 2005. A hard ceiling on spending was designed to stop exactly this, and the math of keeping a roster together is brutal, the kind of squeeze our salary cap explainer walks through. Three repeats in twenty cap-era seasons is not a lot. Two of them landing in this three-year window is the tell that Florida and Carolina built something sturdier than a hot spring.

The phantom in the record book

Now the trap that trips up half the lists you will find online. Search "most Stanley Cups" long enough and you will hit a table crediting the "St. Louis Eagles" with four titles. The Eagles won nothing. They existed for a single season, 1934-35, as the relocated original Ottawa Senators, then folded when the NHL bought out the franchise. The four Cups in question (1920, 1921, 1923, 1927) were won while that club still played in Ottawa, so they belong to the defunct original Senators, not to St. Louis.

This matters for two more teams. The modern St. Louis Blues are a separate 1967 expansion club, and they have exactly one Cup, won in 2019 after the longest wait for a first title in league history. The modern Ottawa Senators, founded in 1992, share a name with that 1920s power and nothing else; they have never won. So a clean reading of the record book gives the original Senators four NHL-era Cups (their broader pre-NHL tally is debated and larger), the Blues one, and the modern Senators zero. Three different franchises, one recycled myth.

"I wasn't sure I was going to raise it over my head, because that's more of a player thing, but I had no choice." — Rod Brind'Amour, who captained Carolina's 2006 Cup and coached its 2026 one, via NHL.com (2026)

The ten still waiting

Ten current franchises have never had their night. Here are the teams still chasing a first Cup:

1. Buffalo Sabres
2. Vancouver Canucks
3. San Jose Sharks
4. Ottawa Senators (modern)
5. Nashville Predators
6. Minnesota Wild
7. Winnipeg Jets (current)
8. Seattle Kraken
9. Utah Mammoth
10. Columbus Blue Jackets

Some came agonizingly close. Buffalo reached two Finals and is now living its own record playoff drought. Vancouver lost a Game 7 at home in 2011. The pain of being a perennial bridesmaid is a real thing, as our piece on Corey Perry's six Finals and one ring laid out from the player side.

A relocation footnote keeps the never-won column honest. The current Winnipeg Jets are the old Atlanta Thrashers, a different franchise from the 1979 Jets, who became the Coyotes and now the Utah Mammoth; both carry zero Cups. Washington, by contrast, climbed off this list in 2018 when Alex Ovechkin finally broke through, the capstone on the chase we covered in Ovechkin's record run. Getting that first one is the hardest line to cross on the whole list.

Sources and Reporting

• Wikipedia, List of Stanley Cup champions: master franchise totals and winning years
• NHL.com: Carolina's 2026 title and Brind'Amour quote
• NHL.com Panthers: Florida's back-to-back 2024 and 2025 Cups
• ESPN: Paul Maurice and the Panthers' character
• Wikipedia, St. Louis Eagles: the one-season franchise and the original Senators' titles
• ESPN: the current teams that have never won

The Verdict: The Two-Cup Surge

Montreal's 24 is safe for the rest of our lifetimes, and Toronto's 13 and Detroit's 11 are not getting caught soon either. So stop watching the top of this list. The story is the Two-Cup Surge, where Florida and Carolina turned the two-title line into the busiest address in hockey in a span of three Junes. My bet is that Florida adds a third before Carolina does, given the Panthers' cap structure and core ages, though both belong in the 2027 conversation our Cup futures breakdown handicaps. Watch the bottom of the leaderboard, not the top. That is where the next name gets written.