Menu

NHL MVP

Six Candidates For NHL MVP

,

The NHL regular season comes to an end next weekend and it’s time to look at candidates for the Hart Trophy, given annually to the NHL MVP. Here are six worthy candidates followed by how I’d rank them…

Connor McDavid (Edmonton): Hockey’s brightest young star would invoke the name of Gretzky even if he didn’t play for the Oilers. McDavid has The Great One’s ability to vault to the top of the points leaders through his passing—his 63 assists are the NHL’s best and the reason McDavid has a league-leading 91 points. At 20-years-old, he’s leading Edmonton back into the playoffs.

Sidney Crosby (Pittsburgh): Winner of two previous Hart Trophies and runner-up last year, Crosby’s 43 goals lead the league and he also has 41 assists. Going in his favor is that the Penguins have enjoyed another great year and it’s due to their offense, which has scored more than anyone else, while the defense ranks 18th. Working against Crosby is that he does get to play each night with Evgeni Malkin and Phil Kessel.

Patrick Kane (Chicago): Last year’s MVP, Kane’s numbers of 34 goals/53 assists are notably down from 2016’s stat line of 46/60. He’s still clearly the best player on a top five offense and on a team that took over a close division race and pulled away from Minnesota down the stretch.

Sergei Bobrovsky (Columbus): The goaltender who has lifted the Blue Jackets into the conversation with Pittsburgh and Washington in that brutal Metropolitan Division. Bobrovsky’s 93.5% save rate and his 1.97 goals-against-average are both atop the NHL. It’s most definitely worth noting that Columbus allows more shots on goal than the league average, so Bobrovsky does this in spite of being consistently exposed.

Brad Marchand (Boston): An out-of-nowhere candidate, Marchand’s 38 goals and 45 assists leave him only one point behind Crosby, and Marchand doesn’t play with a cast of stars each night to take the pressure off. The flaws in his candidacy is that you can argue that emerging 20-year-old David Pastrnak is just as valuable to the Bruins and that any discussion of Marchand as MVP certainly has to be contingent on the team fighting their way into the playoffs.

Nikita Kucherov (Tampa Bay): Speaking of playoff contingencies—if the season ended today, the Lightning would be out and any discussion of Kucherov and his 38 goals/42 assists would be off the table. But let’s say Tampa makes it in—they’re only three points behind Boston for the final spot and have a game in hand. Then we’re looking at one of the league’s top scorers who pretty much carried a team that missed Steven Stamkos and goaltender Ben Bishop for long stretches of time, into the postseason. That’s a credible MVP case.

The smart money in Las Vegas has McDavid as the (+120) betting favorite to win the award. As for myself, I believe this is a goaltenders’s league in the same way most people perceive the NFL as a quarterback’s league. When a goalie like Bobrovsky plays as well as he does in spite of being as exposed as he is—and his team is one of the league’s best—that shouts MVP to me.

So my ballot for the Hart Trophy would look as follows

1—Bobrovsky
2—Crosby
3—McDavid
4–Kane
5–Kucherov (moves up to second if Tampa makes playoffs)
6–Marchand

NHL Analysis: Craig Anderson Deserves The Hart Trophy

, , , , , ,

The NHL’s abbreviated regular season has finished and it’s time to decide who should win the Hart Memorial Trophy, awarded to the league’s MVP. A goaltender hasn’t won the trophy since 2002. I think it’s time for that streak to end this year and believe the case for Ottawa’s Craig Anderson is virtually airtight. Today’s NHL analysis will focus on the following…

  • The case on behalf of Anderson
  • The strong case for Sidney Crosby, limited only by his playing time
  • Several other players who deserve to have their names mentioned in this discussion

Craig Anderson leads the NHL in save percentage, stopping 94% of the shots fired at him. This stat alone is impressive enough, but it doesn’t begin to show his value to the Senators. This is a team whose defense ranks in the bottom third of the NHL when it comes to stopping shots, so Anderson’s percentage comes in spite of dealing with a high volume of pucks coming at him. Nor does he get a lot of support from the offense, where Ottawa also ranks near the bottom of the league. In spite of all this, Ottawa made the playoffs.

Thus, Anderson competes in an environment where he’s under constant attack and has no margin for error, yet he succeeded at an extremely high level and led his team into the postseason. If that’s the definition of an MVP I’m not exactly sure what is.

THE CASE FOR CROSBY

As much as I believe in Anderson’s case, if Sidney Crosby had been healthy for the entire year, this conversation might be different. Crosby played in 36 of 48 games and still managed to lead the league in assists. While there is good talent on the Pittsburgh offense, it’s not as dynamic as it was a year ago. Evgeni Malkin, who won the Hart Trophy in 2012, had only nine goals this season. Pascal Dupuis was the only scorer to get 20 goals. I don’t want to make it out like Pittsburgh doesn’t have the talent on offense—they do—but when Crosby was on the ice he was clearly back to his pre-eminent role on this team.

The problem is, how can you dismiss 12 missed games? It’s tough to make an argument for MVP when you miss a quarter of the games your team plays. It’s a testament to Crosby’s ability that he still led the league in assists and added 15 goals in this limited time. It’s a heckuva argument to say that he is, in general, the NHL’s best player. But this is not an “in general” discussion. It’s very specifically about how the Most Valuable Player was in the 48 games that constituted the 2013 season. And Crosby’s missed games are too much to overlook.

HONORABLE MENTION

*Washington’s Alexander Ovechkin had a comeback year, scoring 32 goals and dishing 24 assists. He was the only consistent scorer on a Capitals team that finished third in the Eastern Conference in goals scored and turned their season around to win the Southeast Division. The reason he comes up short is that he has two very good centers passing to him in Niklas Backstrom and Mike Ribiero, so unlike Anderson, Ovechkin didn’t have to singlehandledly carry the Caps.

*Tampa Bay & Chicago both had two elite offensive players, and the very fact that each star had someone else to rely on hurts them in MVP talk. But there’s no denying the years enjoyed by Martin St. Louis and Steven Stamkos in Tampa, as they were the league’s two best point-getters. And Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane each scored 20-plus goals while remaining good passers on the league’s best team.

*How about some love for New York Islanders’ center John Tavares? He scored 28 goals and was the one consistent scorer on an Islanders team that relied on its offense to overcome some subpar goaltending to get back into the postseason. I gave Tavares serious consideration for the top honor. The fact that there were some decent passers to set him up—Matt Moulsen, Brad Boyes and Kyle Okposo—leads me to think Tavares wasn’t quite as lonely as Anderson. But if you were to restrict me to a position player for the award, Tavares would be my choice.

Wrapping Up The NHL Season

, , , , ,

The NHL season officially came to an end last night as the league handed out its awards in Las Vegas. Pittsburgh’s Evgeni Malkin won the Hart Trophy, symbolic of the league’s MVP and New York’s Henrik Lundqvist was named winner of the Vezina Award, which celebrates the league’s top goaltender. TheSportsNotebook believes Phoenix goalie Mike Smith should have won both awards (goalies are eligible for the Hart, as Lundqvist was a finalist), but that had been water under the bridge for some time, as the finalists have been made public for several weeks. Ottawa’s Erik Karlsson was named top defenseman and Ken Hitchcock of St. Louis brought him Coach of the Year. These individual winners—along with several honors—take their place with the Stanley Cup champion Los Angeles Kings in the history books for the 2012 season.

As we go into the offseason the Los Angeles Kings are the big question mark. Is this a team that simply caught lightning in a bottle for a couple months, in becoming the first #8 seed to win the Cup? Or was this a case of a team truly finding itself and set to be a much better regular season team and a consistent contender for more championships in the future?

You can make an argument both ways—on the one hand, goalie Jonathan Quick got into a tremendous zone, but there are eight or nine other goalies around the league capable of similar hot streaks. This would be the classic “hot goalie” thesis where teams blaze and fade in the NHL. On the other hand, Quick did not simply get hot in the playoffs—while there might be eight or nine others just as capable as getting hot, there’s no one who is demonstrably better. Quick is young and therefore Los Angeles has the more important component to a championship in all of sports—even more so than an NFL quarterback, more so than a go-to player in the NBA—in place for years to come.

And when you look at the emergence of players like Anze Kopitar, Dustin Brown and Dustin Penner in the playoffs, it’s hard to say “fluke.” You can certainly wonder where the hell this all was from October to April and why the Kings nearly played themselves out of the postseason entirely. But it’s not like the Kings were riding a hot goalie to a lot of 2-1 wins in games or series wins that extended six or seven. It’s not like they won games where they outshot and only Quick bailed them out. That description better applies to Phoenix and Smith, who made the Western Conference Finals. Los Angeles dominated all facets of play through a postseason run that saw them lose only four games in four rounds. It’s hard to call that a fluke.

We certainly won’t have to wait long to find out. The NHL, apparently convinced that the “offseason” is a dirty word, will be ready to start again in early October . This presumes one thing though, and that’s a new collective bargaining agreement. The word lockout is back in the NHL, and apparently the owners are in the same kind of crackdown mode the NFL felt last summer and the NBA last fall. I find it hard to imagine the league could be so dumb as to  risk any of the season. The NHL already lost an entire year to a lockout in 2005 and has still yet to recover. They’ve finally got a decent TV deal with NBC and its sports affiliate NBCSN, so there’s plenty of incentive for everyone to come together. I expect self-interest to prevail and for the season to start on time Although, like the NBA, I don’t think it would kill the league to wait until late November or mid-December, after the college football regular season is complete, to get rolling and move into an emptier sports calendar.

But that’s a topic for another day. For now TheSportsNotebook is presuming we’ll have a season that starts on time and sends the Kings and all the individual award winners into the offseason with congratulations and looks forward to September when it’s time to start writing team previews for another year.

The Final NHL MVP Ballot

, , , , ,

The playoff spots are settled in the NHL as a tight race at the bottom of the East was settled (Washington in, Buffalo out) and a wild race at the bottom of the West is sorted out (goodbye Dallas, Calgary and Colorado, hello Phoenix, Los Angeles & San Jose). There are some modest changes regarding seeding that will hinge on the final day of play today, but we know the 16 teams who will fight for the Stanley Cup. What we don’t know is who should win the Hart Trophy, the honor given to the NHL’s MVP, so taking a look at that order of business is how TheSportsNotebook will wrap up the hockey regular season.

Let’s begin by taking the broadest view of MVP candidates and eliminating some of them right away. One of the stats I hate the most in both hockey and the NBA is plus-minus, wherein a player’s value is supposedly measured by the number of points his team is up or down while he’s on the floor—as though he’s an isolated actor, able to control this entirely on his own. So even though I love the Boston Bruins and Zdeno Chara, his leading the NHL in this category doesn’t really overwhelm me. And even if I loved this stat, we’d have to note that the next three players on the list are all his teammates and all close behind, so the “Most Valuable” criteria is lost fairly quickly.

There are four goalies who’s save percentages merit their mention. But two of them—Brian Elliot in St. Louis and Cory Schneider for Vancouver—split time with other goaltenders. In fact, if this team’s meet in the Western Conference Finals, there’s no guarantee it would even bee Elliot-Schneider in goal for Game 1. So much for the Most Valuable idea. I don’t dismiss New York Rangers’ goalie Henrik Lundqvist and Phoenix’s Mike Smith. Between the two I give the edge to Smith, as the defenseman for the Coyotes are atrocious, and there’s no such thing as an easy night for their goaltender.

If you love assists, then your favorites would be Henrik Sedin for Vancouver and Claude Giroux for Philadelphia. Giroux gets the edge. He’s only two assists behind Sedin, and Giroux lights the lamp himself—28 goals to the more-heralded Sedin’s 13. We’ll consider Giroux the winner of the “Assists Side Of The Bracket” in this debate and move him to the finals.

Finally we come to the two big candidates, and that’s Evgeni Malkin for Pittsburgh and Tampa Bay’s Steven Stamkos. The Lightning scorer has had an extraordinary season, needing just one goal today to reach the 60 plateau and while his team didn’t make the playoffs, it’s fair to wonder just how hopeless they would have been without him. But I like Malkin’s case better—he’s got 49 goals himself and when you bring assists into the equation Malkin leads the league in offensive production. Along with James Neal, he kept the Penguins as a decent contender while Sidney Crosby was out, and now that the latter is back, the Pens are a legitimate Cup contender.

Thus, different arguments bring Smith, Giroux and Malkin to the finals. I’d dismiss Giroux first. He’s the best of the players who can build their argument around assists, but that’s still the equivalent of being the best college football team in the Mid-American Conference—we applaud it, but we don’t consider you for the national championship. Especially not when Malkin’s offensive play is so complete. But now consider Phoenix—this is a team whose defenseman, as noted above, leaves him ruthlessly exposed to a heavy shot load, whose offense is terrible and whose power play is inept. Yet this team is in first place in the Pacific Division heading into the final day. Is it not reasonable to conclude that Mike Smith basically put the team on his back singlehandedly and pushed them into the postseason? And if we can conclude that, is that not the very definition of an MVP? I think it is, and it’s why the vote of TheSportsNotebook for the Hart Trophy, symbolic of the NHL MVP goes to Phoenix goaltender Mike Smith.