BITTER MEMORIES HAUNT MANY NHL AWARD CANDIDATES
One week doesn’t change anything.
Nikita Kucherov said it. And he said it again. And yet, it was difficult to believe he actually meant it.
How could he?
One week essentially changed everything.
Maybe not for Kucherov, who scored a league-best 128 points during a regular season for the ages and is the front-runner to win the Hart Trophy as league MVP as voted on by the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association and Ted Lindsay Award as MVP as voted by the NHL Players’ Association at the NHL awards tonight.
But it certainly changed everyone’s view of the Tampa Bay Lightning, who despite having one of the most dominant years of any team in the history of the NHL, will mostly be remembered for being swept in the first round of the playoffs.
“At first it sucked,” said Kucherov. “It’s not something that we expected before the playoffs. But we take it as it is. There’s nothing you can do about that. We just have to learn. We just want to prove to people that what happened in the playoffs was a mistake, a fluke, and we just have to get better and prove them wrong.”
Kucherov wasn’t the only award finalist who arrived in Las Vegas with a bitter taste in his mouth.
The Norris Trophy favourite (Calgary’s Mark Giordano) failed to advance to the second round. The same goes for a Vezina Trophy finalist (Tampa Bay’s Andrei Vasilevskiy), while the odds-on pick to win the Calder Trophy (Vancouver’s Elias Pettersson) didn’t even qualify for the playoffs.
The voting for the NHL awards occurs before the playoffs begin, so you never know what’s going to happen after Game 82. But no one could have predicted how much the regular season differed from the post-season.
It raises the question: should we wait until the Stanley Cup is awarded to cast our ballots on who truly had the best season?
“Let’s be honest, this is a celebration of what went on in the regular season,” said Lightning head coach Jon Cooper, who is a finalist for the Jack Adams Trophy. “There’s only two teams that got to play all the way into June. Along the way, teams get knocked off. We were one of them. It just goes to show how hard it is to be there at the end.”
“I think it’s good that they vote on it right after,” said St. Louis forward Ryan O’Reilly, who won the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP and is also a finalist for the Selke Trophy as the league’s top defensive forward. “It’s a long season. I think playoff performances could definitely impact your view on a guy, especially with what he’s done in the post-season.”
This was a bizarre playoff — even stranger than last season, when an expansion team reached the final. The teams and players who had success in the regular season didn’t necessarily carry that success into the playoffs and vice versa, as the St. Louis Blues, who were dead-last on Jan. 2, ended up proving.
The top-seeded teams from each conference failed to reach the second round. The defending champion Washington Capitals, along with Nashville and Winnipeg, went out in the first round despite being favourites. And so, you had a scene on Tuesday where players were talking about all that went right in the regular season while also juxtaposing it with all that went wrong immediately after.
“It was a weird year as far as the playoffs,” Giordano said. “This year was weird. The four division winners went out early. But I think what you take from it is the teams that went to the final were well-balanced, gritty, hard-working teams. We can learn from that, for sure.”
It was an odd scene. On one hand, players were being lauded for their performances in the regular season. On the other, because so many of their seasons ended early, it was a reminder of all that was good and bad about their years.
It was also a reminder that success in the regular season doesn’t mean squat.
“We got the Presidents’ Trophy. That’s the award for the season we had,” said Cooper. “And then you win the next season (the playoffs) and you get the Stanley Cup. Don’t get me wrong, we’re extremely proud of everything that happened in the regular season, but you play to win the Stanley Cup.”