Hockey has always sold itself on its physicality -- the hits that rattle the glass, the fights that spill onto the highlight reels, the sense that at any moment two players might drop the gloves. For the second year running, RotoWire set out to measure exactly which fanbases get to call their team the toughest in the league, and which ones are mostly bark.
Methodology
We ranked all 32 NHL teams by total hits and total fights from the 2025-26 regular season, sourced from moneypuck.com and hockeyfights.com -- the same approach used in last year's piece. Each club was ranked 1 through 32 in hits and 1 through 32 in fights, and those two rankings were averaged into a single score.
The lower the average rank, the more aggressive the team across both categories.
League-wide, teams combined for 53,657 hits and 612 fight-major appearances, with an average team ranking of 16.16.
Also from RotoWire: 11 seasons of NHL data reveal when travel really hurts teams.
How the rankings work: RotoWire ranked all 32 NHL teams by total hits and total fights from the 2025-26 regular season. Each club received two rank positions — 1 through 32 in hits, and 1 through 32 in fights — and those two numbers were averaged into a single average ranking. The lower a team's average ranking, the more aggressive it played across both categories.
Reading the Aggression Score: Because a lower average rank means more aggressive play, RotoWire converts each team's average ranking into a 0-100 Aggression Score for this widget, using the formula 100 − ((avg. rank − 1) ÷ 31 × 100). A team with an average rank of 4 (elite, top of the league) scores 90; a team near the bottom of the league (average rank 31) scores 3. Higher score always means more aggressive — this only affects the bar/score display, not the underlying rankings.
Sourcing: Hits data is from MoneyPuck.com; fights data is from HockeyFights.com — the same sourcing used in the original 2024-25 edition of this study.
League totals: 53,657 combined hits and 612 combined fights (team appearances) across all 32 teams, for a league-average ranking of 16.16.
Ties: Teams with identical average rankings share a tied rank (e.g. T-1, T-10), and the next distinct rank skips ahead accordingly (standard competition ranking).
This is an update to RotoWire's Most Aggressive NHL Teams study from the 2024-25 season.
Boston and Philadelphia Share the Crown
The 
Bruins and 
Flyers tied for the league's most physical team, each posting an average rank of 4 across hits and fights. Florida (6), Ottawa (6.5) and St. Louis (7) rounded out the top five, with Anaheim, the Rangers, Tampa Bay and Calgary close behind.
Boston topped last year's ranking outright, so its repeat appearance at No. 1 isn't a surprise. The Bruins have now finished as one of the league's two most physical teams in back-to-back seasons.
The bottom of the list changed hands, though: Dallas was the league's least aggressive team in 2024-25, but the 
Stars actually climbed to 28th this year, ceding last place to Colorado.
Being Tough Didn't Buy Anyone a Long Playoff Run
Of the nine most physical teams in the league this season, four never got to the playoffs at all. Florida -- the back-to-back defending champion and the NHL's third-most aggressive team -- missed the postseason entirely after an injury-plagued year. St. Louis, the Rangers and Calgary joined them on the outside looking in, with the Flames missing for a fourth straight season and the Rangers for a second.
The five physical teams that did qualify didn't fare much better. Boston, tied for the league's most aggressive team, was eliminated in six games by Buffalo in the first round. Tampa Bay lost a seven-game first-round battle to Montreal.
Anaheim was the group's best showing, winning a round before falling to Vegas in six games. Ottawa was swept in the first round, and Philadelphia -- the other co-owner of the league's toughest reputation -- made it one round further before running into the eventual champion and getting swept as well. Not one of the nine most physical teams in hockey reached a conference final.
The team that did the most damage to that group, ironically, was one of the least physical ones on the ice: Montreal, which finished 12th in this year's aggression ranking, beat Tampa Bay (8th) in seven games in the first round before beating Buffalo in another seven-game series to reach the Eastern Conference Final, where Carolina finally ended the run at NHL betting sites.
The Quiet Champion
That eventual champion was Carolina, which ranked a modest 27th in this study -- well below the league-average aggression level. The Hurricanes swept Ottawa (4th) in the first round, then swept Philadelphia (T-1st) in the second round on an overtime winner in Game 4, before dispatching Montreal in five games to reach the Stanley Cup Final.
There, they beat a Vegas team playing in its third Cup Final in nine seasons in six games, to win the franchise's second championship and first since 2006. Along the way, Carolina eliminated two of the league's four most physical teams without needing more than four games against either.
Colorado's Contradiction
If Carolina's title makes the case that physicality doesn't guarantee playoff success, Colorado's run complicates the opposite theory. The Avalanche finished dead last in this year's aggression rankings -- 32nd of 32, with by far the league's lowest score -- yet swept the Kings in the first round and beat Minnesota in five games to reach the Western Conference Final, where Vegas finally stopped them with a four-game sweep. Vegas itself sat in the middle of the pack at 14th, splitting the difference on its way to a Cup Final loss.
Taken together, the results echo what RotoWire found a year ago: the correlation between how often a team hits and fights and how far it goes in the spring is, at best, weak. The two most aggressive teams in hockey combined to win a single playoff round between them. The team that actually hoisted the Cup ranked closer to the bottom third of the league in both categories than the top.
Two years into this exercise, the pattern holds: throwing the body around and dropping the gloves says plenty about a team's identity, but very little about its ceiling in the spring. Whether that changes next season -- or whether 2026-27 produces its own quiet, physical-in-name-only champion -- is exactly what this ranking will be tracking when the data comes in again next August.
See last year's ranking, "Most Aggressive NHL Teams From 2024-25 Season," for year-over-year comparisons.
