National Post (National Edition)
TIGHT RACE
IS CONNOR McDAVID THE BEST IN THE NHL? THIS YEAR, MVP COULD GO TO NUMBER OF PLAYERS.
Iam about to break columnist protocol. We are supposed to forcefully argue one side of a position and persuade the reader with logic and facts and the odd joke and maybe even a choice anecdote. My side of (given issue) is the only correct side! (Spectacular explosion.)
But on the matter of Connor McDavid and the Hart Memorial Trophy, a confession: I can kind of see both sides here. (Cut to a scene of me putting my laptop and credentials on my editor’s desk, then walking out of the office. The door slams and one side of the blinds on the adjacent window falls down awkwardly.)
As the learned reader is probably aware, this is a particularly weird year for the NHL’s most valuable player award, where there is no clear favourite and it is expected to be the closest vote in many seasons. But the reason it is an odd debate, one where I’m not convinced there’s an obviously correct call, is because the dispute mostly comes down to a subjective opinion of what you think “valuable” means.
Is it the best player in the league? The best player on a good team? The player who contributed the most on a surprising team?
Muddying the waters further is voters have gone with players in all of the above categories before.
If you are fine with the Hart simply recognizing the best player, then McDavid should win in a walk. He has taken control of the scoring race with 103 points, which only confirms what everyone knew about him when he arrived two-plus seasons ago: He’s a transcendent talent, so good he will score in bunches regardless of the quality of the team around him.
But that’s also the problem. With apologies to Montreal, his Edmonton Oilers are easily the biggest disappointment in the NHL this season, a team that looked for all the world like it had finally arrived and then promptly went straight into a ditch. Entering Tuesday, the Oilers had more points than only six other teams. There is nothing specific in the wording of the Hart Trophy requirements that demands it must go to someone on a playoff team, but that’s usually the case with MVP awards and not just in hockey.
It’s subjective, but the feeling persists: to be the most valuable player in the league, that value should at least translate into a minimum of team success. Whatever bar you want to set for that minimum of success, the Oilers have slid under it.
But by the great-playeron-good-team metric, there’s no obvious candidate there, either. Entering Tuesday, Nikita Kucherov in Tampa Bay and Evgeni Malkin in Pittsburgh were second and third in the scoring race behind McDavid at 97 and 96 points, but they have similar cases: great players on loaded teams with the MVP talk lessened somewhat by the fact that neither is the biggest star on his team. Claude Giroux in Philadelphia and Anze Kopitar in Los Angeles are also among the scoring leaders and maybe they end up with extra Hart votes because their rosters aren’t as stacked as those in Tampa and Pittsburgh.
Further in that vein are Nathan MacKinnon in Colorado and Taylor Hall in New Jersey, clearly the best players on teams that have performed unexpectedly well, evenifbothhaveyettolock down playoff spots. Some other names will fill out ballots: Blake Wheeler, Alex Ovechkin, Sidney Crosby, Brad Marchand, various Maple Leafs. But it’s hard to see any from that group gaining enough votes to pass all the others.
I suspect that among the hockey writers given a Hart vote, there will be many for whom the choice will have to come from a playoff team. The Oilers won 18 games in the first half of the season, then lost the next three. They were out of the playoff race in early January, even with McDavid blasting around on his rocket skates and giving opposing goalies the flop sweats. I’ve seen some argue a Hart winner on a non-playoff team has to be dominant, like when Mario Lemieux was lapping the field on bad Penguins teams.
I’m just not sure McDavid’s lack of dominance can be waved away. This is an era in which hockey players are increasingly evaluated at fiveon-five, allowing for the fact special teams time can skew points for and against dramatically. At even strength, McDavid had 81 points this season, 19 ahead of Kopitar and MacKinnon, who were tied for second with 62. McDavid is also first in evenstrength goals at 35, four more than Vegas’ William Karlsson and five more than Kucherov and Ovechkin.
Where the league’s other leading scorers have netted well over 30 power-play points, McDavid has just 18. He’s just 57 th in the NHL in power-play ice time, a product of Edmonton’s inability to draw penalties because Edmonton is, as already noted, not good.
If one of the players on a playoff team had separated himself from the pack, this would all be much simpler. But I keep coming back to McDavid. He has points on 46 per cent of Edmonton’s goals, miles ahead of the rate of Kucherov (35 per cent) and Malkin (37 per cent). No one doubts that he’s the best player in the NHL. For the MVP award, that should be enough.