Long-shot NHL award picks: Zach Werenski for Hart? Stuart Skinner for Vezina?

With the NHL’s 2026-27 season almost upon us, it’s time to make some award picks.

Easy, right? Connor McDavid for the Hart, Cale Makar for the Norris, Porter Martone for the Calder, and all the various other favorites. Maybe a Macklin Celebrini here or a Nikita Kucherov there if you want to be different.

So sure, easy. Too easy. For today at least, we’re skipping the favorites and aiming a little higher. It’s time for our annual attempt to nail some true longshots.

We’ve been trying this for years. Do we get any right? Eh, not necessarily. But we’ve had some impressive near-misses, including last year when Gentille was sniffing around the Celebrini offensive outburst before just about anyone. But when we’re wrong, we’re really wrong. That’s part of the point – to look back a year or more later and realize how random a lot of this can feel.

We’ll be using the odds posted by Bet365 as of early this week. (Note that odds can change over time.) To be clear, the idea here isn’t to encourage you to be on anything – we already have every intermission report on every TV broadcast to handle that. But the oddsmakers are a good measure of where expectations have been set, in a mostly objective way.

For our purposes, we’re looking for odds of at least +2000, which is to say longshots of 20-to-1 or more, with the “we” being Sean Gentille, Sean McIndoe and Dom Luszczyszyn. If we hit one, you’ll ever hear the end of it. If we whiff on everything, at least we’ll know we took the bat off our shoulder.

Let’s find some plausible longshots.

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What was the cap era's best team to not get a single Hart vote? The answer is weird

I’ll make you a deal: You indulge me in one of those Slow News Summer ideas I’ve had kicking around, and at the end I’ll surprise you with something weird that I found while researching it.

Do we have a deal? Sure we do. Let’s start with the Carolina Hurricanes.

As you may have heard, they won the Stanley Cup this year, the ultimate dream for every long-suffering hockey lifer and/or middle-schooler. And in doing so, they might have established themselves as the best team in the history of the NHL to not have a single Hall-of-Famer. We obviously can’t know that for sure yet, but I ran down the Carolina candidates a few weeks ago and included a reader poll, and the majority of you agreed that the Hurricanes might have a Hall, but don’t have anyone Hall-worthy.

But let’s take it one step further, with something we can quantify today: The Hurricanes also managed to win the Cup with a roster that didn’t receive so much as a single Hart Trophy vote. Surely they must also be the best team in that category too.

In theory, we’re lowering the bar here by more than a bit. Getting into the Hall of Fame is hard – you need to put up a career worthy of the sport’s ultimate honor, and then you also have to sufficiently impress the mysterious committee and meet whatever criteria they’re using that year. A few questionable picks aside, making the Hall of Fame means you were a legend, or at least spent multiple years looking the part.

But getting Hart votes? Like, any at all? That’s not all that hard. In the cap era, there were 129 ballots sent back for the 2006 awards, and that number has increased up to almost 200 in recent years. Winning the Hart is tough, sure. But getting even a single vote just means that one of those 200 or so voters thought you were worthy of a top-five mention. We’re talking about roughly 1,000 spots available on ballots around the league, and you only need to show up on one.

That’s not easy, but it’s not exactly a monumental challenge. After all, the list of players who’ve had cap-era Hart votes includes Pascal Dupuis, Cam Atkinson, Radim Vrbata, William Karlsson and Marek Svatoš. And that’s not even getting to the goalies who caught a stray vote, a list that includes Daniel Vladař, James Reimer and the immortal Andrew Hammond.

So yeah, this is going to be a lot tougher than the HHOF list, and clearly the Hurricanes doing it while winning the Cup will be a huge outlier. But let’s give it a try anyway. We’ll start at the dawn of the cap era in 2005 and work our way forward, flagging the best teams I could find that were completely shut out of the Hart love.

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Long-shot NHL award picks: Quinn Hughes for Hart? Jack Hughes for Art Ross?

One of my favorite things to do each year is check the betting odds for all the various awards. Not because I want to actually wager on any of them, but because it’s always fascinating to see what kind of consensus is forming around who’s likely to win what – and who isn’t.

Despite all the effort and analysis that goes into setting those odds, it’s not unusual for a longshot to come out of nowhere and win a major award. Leon Draisaitl was 22-to-1 to win the Hart in 2020, Adam Fox was 35-to-1 to win the Norris in 2021, and Linus Ullmark was 80-to-1 to win the Vezina in 2023. Were the oddsmakers dumb? Not really. It’s just that the NHL is incredibly unpredictable, and the awards odds are just another reminder of that inescapable fact.

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A brief history of the second-team all-star goalie being the NHL’s weirdest award

With a just few weeks left before awards ballots go out, we already know how one of the races will go. Connor Hellebuyck will win the Vezina. And if there’s any justice, the GMs who vote on the award will make it unanimous.

Cool. Now let’s talk about the best goaltending award.

Not the award for best goaltender – I mean the award for goaltending that is the best. The best award, as in the most fun, the most interesting, and also the weirdest.

I’m talking about the second all-star team honors.

Yes, this might be something only I’m interested in. But today, I’m going to try to get you onboard.

Each year, PHWA writers vote to create two all-star teams, which are not to be confused with the (far inferior) teams from the actual all-star game in seasons where the NHL forces us to endure one. These postseason all-star awards are a genuine honor, proof that a player was considered among the very best at his position during that season.

Each of the two teams consist of two defensemen, a center, a left and right winger, and a goalie. The highest vote-getters earn first-team honors, which is the very best of the best of any given year. Then comes the second-team, which is… sometimes interesting.

That’s true at all positions, at least occasionally. Sometimes you’ll see a good-but-not-great player earn second-team honors up front, like Thomas Vanek in 2007 or a 39-year-old Ray Whitney in 2012. Sometimes a lesser-known defenseman will earn the honors, like Lubomir Visnovsky in 2011 or Francois Beauchemin in 2013. But for the most part, a look at the second-team all-star squads are pretty much the names you’d expect – the best of the best, with the occasional exception that proves the rule.

Second-team goalie honors? Those get weird. Or at least, they serve up some names that you might generously call unexpected.

It could happen again this year, with Logan Thompson battling Andrei Vasilevskiy for second-team honors. One of those guys has a Vezina, a Conn Smythe and multiple Cup rings. The other is Logan Thompson, who got traded in the offseason for midround draft picks. He’s probably the favorite.

Why? Because goaltending is weird. And apparently, being the league’s second-best goaltender is especially weird. Let’s remember some guys, who had one year where they were very nearly The Guy.

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When the players and the writers disagree on the best player: Breaking those ties

With a month left to go in the regular season, some of the award races are more of less settled. Connor Hellebuyck is going to win the Vezina, and will also be a first-team all-star. Barring an injury, Leon Draisaitl will win the Rocket Richard. Sasha Barkov seems set to win another Selke, and Spencer Carberry is pulling away in the Jack Adams race.

But other awards are still up in the air, including the big one: The Hart Trophy, for league MVP, as voted on by the writers. That means we can assume that the Ted Lindsay for best player as voted on by the NHLPA is also up for grabs. And that means there’s at least a decent chance that we get a split, with the players and the writers picking different players for their top honors.

I can’t decide whether or not I hate when that happens.

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Filling in history's awards gaps with once-a-decade bonus trophies that I made up

We’re almost at the end of 2024, which means we’re almost half through the 2020s. That reminded me of a decades-based idea I’ve had kicking around for a while, and since I don’t have the patience to wait five more years, we’re doing it today.

What if, at the end of every decade, we went back over the last ten years’ of major award winners and gave out one bonus award to someone who’d deserved one but never won?

The idea would be simple enough, and it would annoy the sort of people who performatively complain about participation trophies, and those are both good things. So today, I’m going back to the 1980s to figure out who’d deserve the bonus trophy for four awards: The Hart, Norris, Vezina and Jack Adams. I’m not including the Selke because I feel like defensive play is too subjective, or the Lady Byng because it isn’t a real award, or the Mark Messier because I don’t want to doom anyone. But I think the big four should make for some fun arguments, so let’s do this.

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Remembering 10 times a season's list of Jack Adams finalists did not hold up well

The firing of Jim Montgomery this week was newsworthy for plenty of reasons, mostly surrounding what it means for the spiralling Bruins. But it was also interesting for awards watchers, who probably recall Montgomery winning the Jack Adams as coach of the year in 2023. It’s fair to say that the list of that year’s finalists has, as the kids say these days, not aged well.

Ruff didn’t even make it through the 2023-24 season, while Hakstol was gone early in the offseason. Montgomery was the comparative ironman, making it all the way until Tuesday.

Three coaches, the apparent very best of the best in 2023, all fired before the end of 2024. We have to ask the question: Is the Jack Adams cursed?

No, because curses aren’t real. But it is a weird award, one that’s typically voted on as much based on short-term surprise factor as long-term excellence. If the trophy truly went to the best coach in the league every year, we’d expect to see plenty of names listed as multiple-time winners, just like we do for the Hart or the Vezina. With the exceedingly rare Jim Carey-level exception that proves the rule, you almost never see nominations for major player awards go to guys who are out of a job entirely within a few years.

But you do see it with the Jack Adams, in part because the broadcasters who vote on it typically lean towards coaches whose teams have exceeded expectations, which is nice but not the same as being the best at the job. Worse, a spot as a Jack Adams finalist combined with an surprisingly strong season often raises expectations, and expectations can be an NHL coach’s worst enemy.

So maybe it’s not surprising that we see the occasional outlier like that 2023 trio of soon-to-deposed coaches. The problem is it’s not much of an outlier at all. So today, let’s look through the Jack Adams finalists for every season of the cap era and ask a simple question: How well did the list hold up, in terms of those guys clearing the low bar of simply keeping their jobs?

I’ve pulled ten years where the answer ranges from “not great” to “big oof”, which seems like a lot considering we’ve only got 19 years to choose from. Let’s count down those 10 lists of finalists, from bad to worse.

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Martin St. Louis for Jack Adams? Mitch Marner for Art Ross? We made 24 longshot award picks

Predicting the NHL award winners for the coming season can be a hit-and-miss exercise, to put it lightly.

Sometimes the obvious favorite wins, like Connor Bedard taking last year’s Calder. At -135 odds, that means the bookies thought he was more likely to win than everyone else combined, and sure enough he ran away with the award, to absolutely nobody’s surprise.

Other times, the winner is a little bit less obvious, but only a little. Last year’s Rocket Richard favorite was Connor McDavid, but Auston Matthew was right behind him at +300, which is to say 3-to-1 or a 25% chance – hardly a surprise winner. Nathan MacKinnon was 10-to-1 for the Hart, trailing only McDavid. Connor Hellebuyck’s Vezina (13-to-2) and Quinn Hughes’ Norris (10-to-1) were in the same range. 

But we do get surprises, like Rick Tocchet winning the Jack Adams despite being a 25-to-1 preseason longshot, trailing behind 15 other coaches, including several like D.J. Smith, Todd McLellan and Jay Woodcroft who didn’t even make it through the season.

Tocchet became the latest in a long list of surprise award winners, at least based on those preseason odds. That preseason part is important, because many of those winners go on to feel like they were obvious or even inevitable, and it’s hard to remember that there was a time when nobody was expecting them. For example, when Leon Draisaitl won the Hart in 2020, he’d gone into the season as a 22-to-1 longshot. When Adam Fox won the Norris three years ago, he’d been listed at 35-to-1, well back of names like Torey Krug and John Klingberg. Marc-Andre Fleury was 40-to-1 for the 2021 Vezina, trailing behind Mikko Koskinen, while Linus Ullmark was 80-to-1 for the 2023 version, tied with Logan Thompson for 23rd place.

You get the idea. Every now and then, someone comes out of next-to-nowhere to win a major award, and nobody sees it coming.

Or do they? That’s the idea behind today’s post, as three of us -- Dom Luszczyszyn, Sean Gentille and Sean McIndoe -- are going to take our best swing at nailing a longshot. We’ll take eight of the major awards and limit ourselves to players who are listed at 20-to-1 or worse, and try to make the case for why our guy could shock everyone by taking home the hardware.

If we’re right, you’ll never hear the end of it. If we’re wrong, we’ll never bring it up again. Sounds like we can’t miss, so let’s take a shot at this.

(All historical odds are taken from Sports Odds History. All odds for this coming season are from Draft Kings, and were current as of publish date.)

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A brief history of the Sam Pollock Trophy, a fake award for NHL Trade of the Year

We’re into August, well and truly the dead zone of the NHL offseason. While we occasionally do see a major roster move or two this late into the summer, it’s just as often the case that all the big headlines are done until we get close to camp.

So if the 2024 offseason is all but over, what was your favorite blockbuster? Was it the Mitch Marner trade that finally blew up the Leafs’ underachieving core? Or maybe big moves involving Martin Necas or Nik Ehlers? Are you going with one of those culture-changing shakeups that the Rangers promised? Or maybe it was when the Ducks finally pulled the trigger on the long-rumored Trevor Zegras deal.

Oh… right.

None of those deals have happened. At least not yet, and in some cases, pretty clearly not anytime soon. The summer hasn’t been a total letdown, with some legitimately big moves involving names like Jacob Markstrom, Mikhail Sergachev, Linus Ullmark and Pierre-Luc Dubois. But overall, if you’re a fan the dying art of the hockey blockbuster, the summer’s been a bit of a letdown.

This sounds like a good excuse to make up another award.

 

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A history of the Bourque Trophy for best final season, another fake award

Last week, we wasted your valuable time and attention with a made-up award. And as often happens, you readers responded with “Yes, OK, but what if it we made it even weirder?”

Specifically, reader Stan D. saw our piece on the Carson Trophy, a fake award for best sophomore player, and wanted to know what an annual award would look like for the player with the best final season.

Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce the Bourque Trophy. Named in honor of Phil for some reason Ray Bourque, and his final season in Colorado that saw him put up 59 points while finishing as a first-team all-star and Norris runner-up and the age of 40. I can’t remember how the playoffs went but hopefully those ended well for him too.

The rules: We’re looking for players who played their final season in a given year, although this is an NHL award, so players who subsequently head to Europe or elsewhere are fine. And while this award is very specifically for the best final season and not intended as a lifetime achievement award, voters will probably ignore this and factor in career accomplishments in close races. Stupid hockey writers, they’re the worst.

Finally, you may be wondering how the voters at the time would have known who had actually played their final season, given that some of these guys later attempted comebacks or went down to the AHL or tried to rehab injuries after what turned out to be their final season. Great point, and if this really bothers you, I’m going to suggest you take this whole thing a lot less seriously.

As with last time, we’ll head back to 2005 and cover the cap era. We probably won’t see as many great seasons as the Carson served up, but let’s see where this goes.

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A modern history of the NHL’s sophomore of the year award, which does not exist

It doesn’t seem like we’re going to get much of a Calder race this year. Barring an injury or something very unexpected, the trophy for Rookie of the Year is going to go first overall pick Connor Bedard. He’s a huge favorite at all the sportsbooks, and our own writers had him as a unanimous pick in our most recent prediction panel. Do you know how much of a favorite you have to be for not even one writer to play the contrarian card? A big one. The race is all but over.

But forget the Calder. What about the Carson, the trophy awarded to the best second-year player in the NHL? It’s named after Jimmy Carson, who put up 55 goals and 107 points as a 19-year-old sophomore back in 1987-88, and it’s possible you’ve never heard of it before because I just made it up.

But it would be a cool award, right? And if it existed, we’d be watching a solid race play out. A so-so start by Matty Beniers would have opened the door to names like Wyatt Johnston, Kirill Marchenko and Andrei Kuzmenko up front, plus Jake Sanderson and Owen Power as blueline candidates. We could argue about that race all day, and arguing all day is lots of fun, according to the people who comment on my articles.

So today, let’s go back through the cap era and hand out the Carson Trophy to the best sophomore player, which is to say the best guy who’s one year removed from his final Calder-eligible season. Make some room in those trophy cases, gentlemen, there’s a new award in town.

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Puck Soup: Cast your ballot

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We go through our contenders and pretenders for each of the major awards
- With Dallas Eakins now safe, we play keep or can with a dozen other coaches
- Mark Stone is back, but it might be too late after a bad night for the Golden Knights
- Ryan gives a college hockey update
- Big news: I listened to one of Ryan's bands
- Doughty out, Malkin suspended and lots more...

>> Stream it now:

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>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.

Puck Soup: Sources are telling us

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Trade season heats up, but will your favorite team make a deal just for the sake of making a deal?
- Who's selling and who's buying
- Do rumors about P.K. Subban or Shea Weber make sense?
- The Western playoff race is chaos
- The Coyotes are a juggernaut, and also Phil Kessel made a baby
- Are people getting weirder about awards?
- And lots more...

>> Stream it now:

>> Or, listen on The Athletic or subscribe on iTunes.

>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.

Puck Soup: Habs/Lighting, NHL awards, Blackhawks scandal and more...

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We react to the NHL award annoucements
- Where the Stanley Cup final stands after one game
- The Blackhawks abuse scandal evolves and widens
- It's not soudning great for the Olympics
- Seattle and Buffalo get their coaches
- OUFL fried foods and more...

>> Stream it now:

>> Or, listen on The Athletic or subscribe on iTunes.

>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.

Puck Soup: Canada joins the party

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We preview the two North Division series
- Where the other six series are at
- The Canucks get set to make changes, maybe
- Jeff Blashill keeps his job, and what that means for the Wings
- Rick Tocchet and Gerard Gallant interviewing for vacancies
- Filling out Greg's awards ballot
- A new quiz and more...

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>> Or, listen on The Athletic or subscribe on iTunes.

>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.

Puck Soup: Worst. Team. Ever.

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- The Sabres fire Ralph Krueger a few moments before we start recording
- What does Buffalo do now? - We cast our midseason award votes
- Our picks for the best and worst surprises among teams and players
- A quiz about the worst teams ever
- And lots more...

>> Stream it now:

>> Or, listen on The Athletic or subscribe on iTunes.

>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.

Puck Soup: New season when

In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Lambert and I work through what we know about the NHL' return-to-play plans
- Are we getting too late for a January 13 opener?
- We run down the current odds for various individual awards, and highlight our best bets
- A fun quiz where we don't have to explain he rules for half an hour because Greg isn't there
- And more...

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Let’s build the best all-time team that can’t play defense

This year’s Stanley Cup Final matchup between the Tampa Bay Lightning and Dallas Stars set up as a classic showdown between offense and defense. Not entirely — the Stars have plenty of talented offensive players and the Lightning are strong in their own zone. But at a high level, this was the team that scored the most goals in the league against the one that gave up the second fewest.

And offense won. Good.

I know I’m supposed to be impartial, but I’ll always cheer for offense, because it’s more fun. I could appreciate a defensive team, back before that’s what everyone in the league was trying to be. But these days, I’m sick of being told that defense always wins and is the only way to play, even if it’s usually true.

So today, let’s build the best roster of all-time stars that breaks that rule. All offense, no defense. And that last part is a hard and fast rule. If you were ever recognized for your play in your own zone, even a little bit, get out. You’re not welcome here.

How do we do it? By basing this off a suggestion from reader Tyler, who asked: What’s the best roster you can build out of players who never received so much as a single vote for the Selke, Norris or Vezina?

I love it. It’s so simple. Three awards that recognize a player’s ability to keep the puck out of his own net, and we’re disqualifying anyone who ever so much as showed up on a ballot for any of them. This is going to be the most one-dimensional team ever, which means it should be lots of fun.

But first, a few ground rules™:

• Position matters. We need four centers, four left-wingers and four right-wingers. Defensemen can play either side. I’ll do my best to use guys in the position they were best known for, without getting sneaky on anyone who moved around for a season or two.
• No votes means no votes at all. If even one voter thought they were good enough to earn a spot on their ballot, they’re out. We’ll use the hockey-reference database to track who got votes for what.
• We’re starting from 1954 for the Norris and 1978 for the Selke, the first years those were awarded. And while the Vezina dates back to 1927, for our purposes we’re only going back to 1982, when it reverted to being an award that was voted on. Players whose careers started before those seasons are still eligible, but we’re only getting credit for what they did afterwards. Gordie Howe never got a Selke vote, but if we take him then we only get his 1979-80 comeback season. (We will not be taking Gordie Howe.)

Sound good? Let’s do this. Let’s build the most offensive team we can find.

Forwards

We’ll start up front, where things should be easiest. The Norris and Vezina recognize general excellence at a position, so I’m mildly worried about how deep we may have to dig to find guys who never received any votes at all. But the Selke is a specialist award, and it’s possible to be a very good player without ever being considered a great defensive forward. So while it may be slim pickings on the back end, we can make up for that by stocking our team with some of history’s greatest forwards.

Not all of them, of course. Guys like Steve Yzerman and Ron Francis actually won the Selke late in their careers, Peter Forsberg and Doug Gilmour won it in their primes and Joe Sakic and Mike Modano were finalists. Some guys evolve into strong defensive players as their careers wear on. But most star forwards don’t do that; once you know you can light it up in the offensive zone, you tend to stay there. So let’s stock up with an army of history’s greatest one-way glory hounds.

For example, we can start with pretty much our perfect candidate: Wayne Gretzky, who racked up 200-point seasons while barely ever seeing his own zone. We can give him a couple of elite wingers in Alexander Ovechkin and Jaromir Jagr, two flashy Europeans who’ve been constantly criticized for their one-dimensional games, but will be close to unstoppable next to the Great One. And for our second line, let’s start with Mario Lemieux, and put him with Teemu Selanne and Paul Kariya, two old friends who’ll compliment his playmaking perfectly. For our third line, how do Pat LaFontaine, Mike Bossy and Ilya Kovalchuk grab you?

Those lines are so good. I think we’re going to have to put Brett Hull and his 700 goals on the fourth line. Forget goaltending and defense, this team will never see its own end of the rink. We’re going to be unbeatable.

Except.

Yeah … every one of those players I just mentioned got a Selke vote at some point in their careers. All of them.

I’ll admit, I was a little worried about Gretzky, since I remembered him adding a little bit of defense to his game in his Rangers years. But nope, he got his votes when he was shattering records. Three of them, to be exact, for his entire career – a third-place vote in both 1985 and 1986 and a second-place vote in 1990.

Lemieux got the only two votes of his career in 1997. Ovechkin hasn’t had one in 10 years but got a few in 2008 and 2009 before peaking with a 28th place finish in 2010. Jagr got a fourth-place vote in 2007, then another in 2016. Kovalchuk got a lone fourth in 2013. Hull showed up on a ballot once in his 19-season career, in 2003 when he was 38. And so on down the line.

It turns out that virtually everyone gets a Selke vote at some point. Even guys that were constantly criticized for their defensive play throughout their career have a maddening tendency to sneak in a single vote somewhere over the course of their career.

Pierre Turgeon got a first-place Selke vote. What in the actual hell.

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Defensemen and goalies win the Conn Smythe but not the Hart. Why?

The NHL will announce the winner of the Hart Trophy tonight. We know it will be a forward, because the finalists are Leon Draisaitl, Nathan MacKinnon, and Artemi Panarin. It’s the third year in a row and tenth time in the last 13 seasons that all three finalists are forwards. Hold that thought.

We’ve also got a Stanley Cup final game tonight, and each team has a defenseman at the top of the Conn Smythe watchlists, with Miro Heiskanen and Victor Hedman emerging as perhaps the two leading candidates. There are forwards from both teams in the mix, and with a dominant performance in the final, either goalie could move to the front of the line. Hold that thought too.

Last week I tried to figure out if a team made up entirely of players who’d won the Hart Trophy as league MVP could beat a team made up of players that hadn’t. It ends up being closer than it probably should be, for a simple reason: There’s a strong positional bias in Hart voting, so while they had a ton of legendary centers to choose from, things got dicey on wing and downright barren on the blueline and in goal.

It’s actually kind of astounding when you dig into it. Only three goalies have won the Hart since the days of Jacques Plante, and only one defenseman has won it since Bobby Orr. That’s crazy, right? It spurred some discussion in the comment section about why exactly we see this. In a league where we’re told that you build a winning team from the net out, where nobody can win without a hot goalie and a stud on the blueline, why do Hart voters only seem to want to recognize forwards?

A consensus quickly formed, and the consensus was that the voters are bad.

That’s… well, it’s maybe not a terrible place to start. As a member of the PHWA, I’m one of those voters, and I think we can all agree that my votes are always good. (Full disclosure, my five-player Hart ballot had four forwards this year.) But with so many of us voting in any given year, individual ballots don’t matter all that much, and a case of groupthink can sway the vote in the wrong direction. Maybe that’s it. The PHWA is just bad at voting for MVPs.

But there’s a possible flaw in that theory, and it’s one I find interesting. The PHWA doesn’t just vote for one MVP award. In addition to the Hart Trophy for regular season excellence, the writers also vote on the Conn Smythe, for playoff MVP. And somewhat weirdly, the Conn Smythe doesn’t really show the same positional bias.

The Hart was introduced in 1924; the Conn Smythe was first awarded in 1965. Here’s how the winners have broken down by position over the years:

Hart Trophy (regular season MVP)

	Winners	Percentage
C	49	51%
LW	7	7%
RW	18	19%
D	13	14%
G	8	9%
Total	95

Conn Smythe Trophy (postseason MVP)

	Winners	Percentage
C	17	31%
LW	5	9%
RW	6	11%
D	10	19%
G	16	30%
Total	54

Wingers are still having a rough time, but maybe that’s to be expected – up front, center is just a more important position, so we should probably expect to see it represented more in the awards. (And for what it’s worth, wingers have won three of the last seven Conn Smythes.)

But the big takeaway is that goalies and defensemen are getting a fair shake from Conn Smythe voters. Your mileage may vary, but to my eyes that second chart looks a lot more like what I’d expect to see if we’re measuring which players on a hockey team are actually the most valuable.

So what’s going on? Why do voters from the same organization seem to treat two MVP awards so differently?

I asked around, checking in with a few writers who’ve voted for both awards. (I’ve only ever voted for the Hart.) Based on that, and just thinking through the possibilities, I have five theories about what we could be seeing here.

Theory #1: The Conn Smythe voters are different

I said that the PHWA votes on both awards, and that’s true. But it also might be misleading, because it’s not the same group of voters. For the Hart, ballots go out to nearly 200 members from every market in the league. But for the Conn Smythe, the voting list is much smaller, maybe two dozen or so in a typical year, with a mix of national writers and locals who cover the finalists.

That could matter, in a couple of ways. First, the smaller group is made up a lot of recognizable names. You have to have been around a while to get an invite, so the voters should know their stuff. Maybe they’re just smarter, or at least better informed, than the larger Hart voting bloc that occasionally includes writers who cover multiple sports and may not be following the race as closely. Better voters, better results. It’s a possibility.

But having fewer voters might be important in another way, because these two dozen or so writers are presumably all talking to each other. With the Hart and its 200 voters, I can complain all I want about positional bias, but I’m probably not going to move the needle much, if at all. But with the Conn Smythe, one writer who makes a strong case for a goalie or defenseman over intermission popcorn or postgame beers might be able to sway over two or three votes. And with so few in play, that could be enough.

Theory #2: Seeing things in person makes a big difference

The knock against PHWA voters is that when it comes to the Hart Trophy, we just lazily go to the stats page and click “sort by points” and call it a day. As someone who spends hours agonizing over my ballot every year, I can assure that this is not true. It’s never been true. You should ignore anyone who suggests it might be true.

But also, it’s kind of true?

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Grab Bag: Playoff excuses, ultimate losers and Alex Trebek with a mullet

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- My spies have gathered excuses from the NHL's playoff losers
- Where things stand with a possibly historic Ultimate Loser race
- An obscure player who shares a record with Wayn Gretzky and Joe Pavelski
- The month's three comedy stars
- And a YouTube look back at Alex Trebek, his mullet, and the cheesy glory of the 1993 NHL awards

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