Heartbreak has become all too familiar for the Toronto Maple Leafs, winners of 13 Stanley Cups across their 109-year history—although none since 1967, the NHL’s longest title drought.
But while it may offer little solace to a passionate fan base still smarting from a second-round playoff exit in May, the Maple Leafs are starting to look like a dynasty in a different kind of competition.
For the third straight year, Toronto is the NHL’s most valuable team, rising 16% to an estimated $4.4 billion. The Maple Leafs are one of two hockey franchises worth at least $4 billion, along with the New York Rangers, just a year after the sport broke the $3 billion barrier and four years after it first reached $2 billion.
That growth extends across the league, with the 32 NHL clubs’ average valuation climbing 15% year-over-year to $2.2 billion. The increase follows even larger jumps in each of the last two years, leaving teams worth more than double the $1 billion average from 2022.
Even the NHL’s least valuable team—the Columbus Blue Jackets—is up 30% since 2024, to $1.3 billion, meaning that the league’s floor now exceeds the entry price in MLB, where Forbes valued the Miami Marlins at $1.05 billion in March. While both leagues had a financial cellar of $1 billion last year, this is the first time that the hockey list’s basement dweller has topped baseball’s since Forbes began publishing sports team valuations in 1998.
Of course, the NHL can’t match MLB at the top of the economic leaderboard, where four baseball teams surpass the Maple Leafs, led by the $8.2 billion New York Yankees. Nor, for that matter, is the NHL on a level with the NFL or the NBA, two leagues that have a combined 50 franchises worth more than Toronto.
But there are plenty of reasons to buy into hockey’s growth story. For starters, Forbes estimates that every NHL franchise was profitable during the 2023-24 season, with operating income averaging $74 million and ranging from the Buffalo Sabres’ $11 million to the Edmonton Oilers’ $244 million—one of the best marks in any sport. By contrast, two NBA teams and 11 MLB teams, as well as 16 of MLS’s 29 clubs, were in the red last season, according to Forbes estimates.
Meanwhile, the NHL’s business has continued to expand in a new era of labor peace, with the league and the players’ union ratifying a collective bargaining agreement in July—no small accomplishment in a sport that lost the entire 2004-05 season and parts of 2012-13 because of lockouts. Despite turbulence with regional sports networks that has cost some franchises lucrative local media rights deals, NHL teams averaged $248 million in revenue last season, surging 34% in three years, according to Forbes estimates.
Fueling those gains has been an overhauled approach to sponsorship, including the introduction of corporate logos on helmets and uniforms in 2021 and 2022. According to research firm SponsorUnited, 27 of the NHL’s 32 teams have partners for their jerseys, and 31 do for their headgear. Just as significant was 2022’s launch of digitally enhanced dasherboards, which allow broadcasters to replace the ads painted around NHL rinks and were expected to generate about $200 million last season.
Add it all up, and most league insiders believe that investors’ appetite for hockey clubs is increasing, as evidenced by the revenue multiples in Forbes’ valuations. Three years ago, Forbes valued the 32 franchises at 5.6 times the prior season’s revenue. Now, that number stands at 8.9x, reaching all the way to 12.4x in the case of the Rangers.
Again, the NHL isn’t in the same league as the NFL (where the average multiple is 10.7 times trailing-year revenue) or the NBA (12.9x). But it has surpassed MLB (6.4x) and is in range of the 9.3x figure in MLS, a sport much earlier on its maturation curve.
To justify that demand, the NHL will need to keep growing, and without the benefit of entirely new sponsorship inventory like uniform sponsors or digital dasherboards. The league has already had success on the margins, however, recently signing its first luxury watch partnership with the Swiss brand Norqain (which was cofounded by a former NHL player and counts Pittsburgh Penguins captain Sidney Crosby as an investor) and becoming the first major North American sports league to announce partnerships with prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket. At the local level, teams collectively raised their sponsorship revenue 9% last season, according to SponsorUnited estimates.
The NHL also sees opportunities internationally and with its media rights.
In November, the league opened an office in Zurich to help cultivate its European fan base and sponsor pool, and its players will compete in high-profile tournaments on the world stage at the 2026 Winter Olympics and the 2028 World Cup of Hockey, with plans to hold more regular-season NHL games overseas in the coming years as well.
Closer to home, the NHL announced a new 12-year Canadian broadcast deal with Rogers Communications in April for nearly $8 billion at the current exchange rate—more than doubling the average annual value of the league’s existing agreement—and the value of the agreement could wind up even higher if the league is able to upsell French-language and single-night national packages that it reserved for potential sub-licensing.
The deal is an encouraging sign for the future of the NHL’s U.S. media rights—its current ESPN and TNT agreements, worth an average of roughly $630 million a year, are set to expire in 2028—and the league has also been heartened by Canadian teams’ ability to negotiate higher local media rights fees despite the rocky regional sports network landscape south of the border.
At the same time, the NHL and its teams will have additional inventory to peddle to television networks—along with opportunities to sell more tickets and hot dogs—when the new collective bargaining agreement takes effect. In exchange for shortening the preseason, players agreed to extend the schedule to 84 games, from 82, starting in 2026-27.
For now, the valuation increases are largely hypothetical because there haven’t been any control sales of NHL teams this year, after two clubs changed hands in 2023 (the Nashville Predators in a multi-phase deal for about $880 million and the Ottawa Senators for $975 million) and another two traded in 2024 (the Arizona Coyotes for $1.2 billion, eventually becoming the Utah Mammoth, and the Tampa Bay Lightning for $1.8 billion). But there are a few deals looming that could put hockey’s new financial math to the test.
Tom Dundon is believed to be nearing an agreement to sell a significant minority stake in the Carolina Hurricanes, and Fenway Sports Group has had the Pittsburgh Penguins on the block since January, although it is unclear whether the group will ultimately sell a majority or minority stake. Next year, meanwhile, Rogers Communications—which owns 75% of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, the parent of not only the NHL team but also the NBA’s Toronto Raptors, MLS’s Toronto FC and the Canadian Football League’s Toronto Argonauts—is expected to exercise an option to buy the rest of MLSE from billionaire Larry Tanenbaum.
Then there is the question of expansion. The NHL, which saw the Seattle Kraken take the ice in 2021 for a $650 million fee, has no formal plans to swell beyond 32 teams, but commissioner Gary Bettman has teased the idea, telling CNBC last month that the league’s existing owners have made clear that any expansion fee would have to “start with a two”—as in $2 billion. And any successful bid would likely have to include a new arena, which could tack on a capital investment of $1 billion.
It would be a big score for a league that thinks it is already on the power play.
2025 NHL TEAM VALUES
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Forbes’ NHL team valuations are enterprise values (equity plus net debt) and reflect the economics of each team’s arena (including non-NHL revenue that accrues to the team’s owner) but not the value of the real estate itself. Team values also exclude other related businesses with separate financial statements, such as ancillary real estate developments or team-owned regional sports networks.
Revenue and operating income (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) are estimated for the 2024-25 regular season and are net of revenue sharing and arena debt service. Playoff revenue is excluded.
Team values are rounded to the nearest $25 million, and revenue and operating income estimates are rounded to the nearest $1 million. All figures are in U.S. dollars based on the average U.S.-Canada exchange rate during the 2024-25 season (1 CAD = 0.73 USD).
The information used to compile Forbes’ valuations primarily came from interviews with team and league executives, bankers, advisors and consultants, as well as public documents, such as arena lease agreements and bond documents.
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