Panarin emerging as dark horse for MVP
Draisaitl front-runner to be NHL’S MVP, but Rangers star now part of conversation
I’ll be honest: Leon Draisaitl would have received my vote for the Hart Trophy when the NHL season was paused on March 12. Now that the regular season is officially over, nothing much has changed in that regard.
I fully expect that the Edmonton Oilers centre will be crowned MVP whenever the awards are handed out sometime this summer.
The only real question is whether it will still be a slam dunk.
That’s where the NHL’S decision to expand the post-season by another eight teams could make things interesting. By definition, the Hart Trophy is awarded not to the league’s most outstanding player (that’s what the player-voted Ted Lindsay Award is for), but rather to the player who is deemed “most valuable to his team.”
The wording is important.
It’s why Taylor Hall won the award two years ago after willing the New Jersey Devils into an unlikely playoff spot, despite finishing sixth in scoring. And it’s why Connor Mcdavid, who led the league with 108 points that year, finished fifth in voting — the captain’s Oilers were 17 points out of a playoff spot.
You have to be great to win the Hart Trophy. More than that, you have to make your team great — or, at the very least, a contender.
For this reason, Artemi
Panarin wasn’t part of the Hart Trophy conversation a couple of months ago when the New York Rangers were on the outside looking in at a playoff spot. But with the NHL expanding the field of post-season teams from 16 to 24, the MVP race has also expanded.
You can’t fault Panarin — or Chicago’s Patrick Kane and Florida’s Jonathan Huberdeau — for being on a non-playoff team anymore. According to the NHL, they are now contenders. Who knows, they might have been anyway, had COVID-19 not disrupted things.
“I really thought, if the season continued, the Rangers would have made the playoffs. They were on such a run,” said Joe Micheletti, the colour commentator for New York’s MSG Network. “Panarin was a big reason for that. I’m obviously a little biased from seeing him play on a daily basis, but I’d give (the Hart) to Panarin.”
“I would put him in my top five, for sure,” said Sam Rosen, the play-by-play voice of the Rangers. “I tend to lean to teams that are in the playoffs, so Panarin deserves consideration from a leaguewide standpoint. He elevates the Rangers as a team. He’s that type of player.”
In late March, a panel of 20 hockey writers from Postmedia News voted Draisaitl as the overwhelming favourite for the Hart Trophy. He received 56 of a possible 60 points, followed by Colorado’s Nathan Mackinnon (25 points), Mcdavid (14 points), Boston’s David Pastrnak (13 points) and Panarin (six points). A panel of writers from Nhl.com also made Draisaitl the unanimous top choice on Thursday. He received 12 of 18 first-place votes, followed by Mackinnon, Pastrnak, Mcdavid and Panarin.
The fact that Draisaitl led the league with 110 points in 71 games and ranked fourth in the Rocket Richard Trophy race with 43 goals, makes him an easy choice for the Hart. He finished with 13 more points than the next highest scorer. The only thing working against Draisaitl is that the next highest scorer happened to be Mcdavid, his teammate and sometime linemate.
As the argument goes, if both are considered Hart Trophy finalists — and they should be — then does that contradict the “most valuable to his team” definition of the award?
It’s been almost 20 years since two teammates were finalists for the Hart, when Pittsburgh’s Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr finished behind Colorado’s Joe Sakic in voting in 2001. You have to go back to 1971 to find a pair of teammates who went 1-2 in voting, when Boston’s Bobby Orr won it and Phil Esposito finished second.
Panarin, who tied for third in scoring with 95 points, doesn’t have nearly the same supporting cast. He finished with 20 more points than Mika Zibanejad, the Rangers’ next-highest scorer. And unlike Pastrnak, who played alongside Brad Marchand and Patrice Bergeron, or Mackinnon, who is flanked by Mikko Rantanen and Gabriel Landeskog, Panarin’s linemates are Ryan
Strome and Jesper Fast, who combined for just 30 goals.
And yet, Panarin still managed to lead all scorers with 71 evenstrength points — five more than Draisaitl — and ranked second in the NHL with a plus-36 rating for a Rangers team that no one predicted would make the playoffs.
“I think he deserves to be in the conversation,” said MSG Radio commentator Kenny Albert. “It could go down as one of the great free agent signings in all of New York sports. If the Rangers don’t sign him, they’d probably have 10 to 12 fewer points. It certainly moved them closer to being a contender.”
Of course, you could say the say the same about Kane, who ranked eighth in scoring for a Blackhawks team that didn’t have another player ranked among the top 40, or Huberdeau, who had 16 more points than the Panthers’ next highest scorer.
Two months ago, when their teams were out of the mix, they weren’t even worth mentioning. But now that they’re headed to the playoffs, their production and overall value to their team doesn’t seem so meaningless anymore.
It should make for an interesting debate.