Where’s the awards buzz for Ovechkin, Carlson?
MONTREAL — Even if John Carlson wanted to ignore his stat line and how it ranks in the National Hockey League, his Washington Capitals teammates wouldn’t let him. Nicklas Backstrom and Alex Chiasson regularly remind him that his name is still atop the points leader board for defencemen, and Carlson still isn’t quite sure what to make of it all.
“Obviously, I know,” Carlson said. “It’s not like I won’t look because I’m superstitious or anything like that. The guys are constantly joking about it, too. So, I know everything, but I don’t actively look at it to prove a point or search for some goal.”
Meanwhile, Alex Ovechkin has no shame in admitting he monitors where he stands in the goal-scoring race. “I don’t believe when someone says, ‘I don’t care about the stats,’ and all of this kind of stuff. Of course they want points, they wants goals,” he said earlier this month.
And just as Carlson’s name is at the very top of the list for points among defencemen, Ovechkin leads the league in goals with 44. Their impressive individual seasons have the Capitals again poised to win the Metropolitan Division, even after salary cap constraints weakened the roster in the summer.
But while both players are at the top of their respective fields for a division-leading, playoff-bound team, both are afterthoughts in NHL awards conversations. When the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association conducted a midseason vote before the all-star game, Carlson received just one first-place vote for the Norris Trophy, which goes to the league’s best all-around blueliner, and he finished in sixth place overall. In voting for the Hart Trophy, the NHL’s MVP award, Ovechkin garnered two first-place votes, placing seventh place. Though some of the candidates for both awards have changed as the season has progressed, both Carlson and Ovechkin flaunted impressive numbers relative to their competition.
Washington entered this campaign without three of its defencemen from last season, so more responsibility fell on Carlson. When fellow right-shot blueliner
Matt Niskanen got hurt in just the fifth game, Carlson averaged nearly 28 minutes per game for the next month.
“I remember all of the coaches early in the year saying they were going to test (Carlson) and see what he’s made of,” Niskanen said. “I think he’s answered that pretty well. They’ve asked a lot of him. A lot. And he’s produced and played steady and played well. He’s been a stud.”
Carlson has played a career-high 24:58 a night while scoring 15 goals and 46 assists for 61 points, also career highs. Eleven of his 15 goals have been at even strength, though Carlson has tallied 24 assists on the power play with the responsibility of setting up Ovechkin’s shot from the left faceoff circle. Though he and Stars defenceman John Klingberg are the only blueliners with more than 60 points so far, the most-talked about candidates for the Norris are Nashville’s P.K. Subban, Tampa Bay’s Victor Hedman and Los Angeles’s Drew Doughty. Hedman and Doughty finished first and second, respectively, in midseason PHWA voting. Those players benefit from good reputations for being defensively sound, while a minus-five rating on the season could hurt Carlson’s candidacy.
Ovechkin arguably has a more compelling case for the Hart Trophy. At age 32, he’s scored 44 goals and 37 assists this season, on pace to finish with his best point total since the 2009-10 season, when he was 24. There’s some debate over whether the Hart should reward the league’s most outstanding player or the player most valuable to his team, and perhaps no player has been more paramount to his team’s success than Ovechkin to Washington this season. After the team parted with two top-six forwards, Ovechkin has accounted for 19.4 per cent of the Capitals’ goal total this season. No other NHL player has a larger share.
“I think he can fly under the radar a little bit when he’s doing it every year,” forward Tom Wilson said.