Golden Knights’ Jack Eichel is a Hart Trophy dark horse in 2025-26

As the 2025-26 NHL regular season kicks off, oddsmakers are sharing their award favorites. For the Hart Trophy, the usual suspects of Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, Nikita Kucherov and Leon Draisaitl remain high on the board.

But one dark horse candidate is Jack Eichel. The Vegas Golden Knights’ forward is coming off a career high 66-assist, 94-point campaign, and the addition of Mitch Marner could provide an offensive boost for a Vegas squad looking to get back to the Stanley Cup Final.

On Thursday’s episode of Daily Faceoff Live, Tyler Yaremchuk and former NHL goaltender Carter Hutton discuss Eichel’s chances of earning Hart Trophy votes and if it’s worth taking a flyer.

Carter Hutton: I guess an outside favorite for me is the Jack Eichel-Mitch Marner combo. For me, Eichel is a puck mover. He’s a playmaker first, and Marner is that way, too, but Eichel has an underrated shot. He’s a goal scorer, he can score when he wants to, and that new dynamic with Marner there is going to force Eichel to shoot more pucks and try to find the back of the net.

Tyler Yaremchuk: That Eichel point is really interesting on a couple of levels. During his career, he’s had 28 goals in 77 games, 31 goals in 63 games, 27 goals in 67 games. If Marner is there and Eichel feels less pressure to be a distributor, maybe it frees him up as a shooter. Maybe 50 goals isn’t out of the realm of possibility for Eichel.

We talked about 50-goal candidates yesterday, but this is a very narrative-driven award, and if Eichel finds a way to get close to 50, and that storyline will be pushed from the east-coast media, saying “Look at Marner and Eichel, look at that chemistry,” there’s a chance he could finish much higher in the voting by the end of the year.

You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode here…