Connor McDavid named NHL Player of the Year for third time

The individual awards ceremony following the results of the next season in the NHL was a personal triumph for Edmonton Oilers forward Connor McDavid. Superb goalscoring and sniping performance earned him his third career Hart Trophy for the best player in the regular season, as well as several other prizes. The Russians at this ceremony for the first time in more than a decade were left without a single trophy.

The Nashville ceremony had one rather significant flaw. In any case, for those to whom not only the entourage is important in such events, but also the intrigue. With intrigue, if we take the main nominations, everything this time was really bad: it was not difficult to predict the winners in all. And it was not difficult to predict its main character.

The most valuable among the individual prizes in the NHL is the Hart Trophy for the best hockey player in the regular championship. Connor McDavid, the current frontman of Canadian hockey, has managed to get it twice before – in 2017 and 2021. And there was no doubt that in 2023 he would receive it for the third time. Even those who did not see how he played in the season could boldly bet on McDavid – there were enough numbers.

Hart Trophy does not always provide statistics. But in this case, she had nowhere to go. 153 points scored by McDavid in the regular season is a record of this century. No one else has since Mario Lemieux mined 161 27 years ago.

McDavid won both the sniper race with 64 goals and the assistant race with 89 assists. There have only been four players in the history of the league who managed to be ahead of everyone else in the championship on three indicators: Howie Morenz from the pre-war NHL, as well as three legends of legends – Gordie Howe, Phil Esposito and Wayne Gretzky. The presence of David Pastrnak from the Boston Bruins and Matthew Tkachak from the Florida Panthers next to McDavid in the top three looked like a formality: the regulations require it to be determined, even if two players have no chance of a prize.

As a result, Connor McDavid was just a little short of taking the Hart Trophy, showing the maximum result.

196 people participate in the voting – representatives of the press covering the NHL. But one turned out to be a frontier, managing to put David Pastrnak in first place instead of McDavid (as everyone else did).

In addition to the Hart Trophy, the 26-year-old Canadian has another small stack of awards. Two – Art Ross Trophy for the top scorer and Maurice Richard Trophy for the best sniper – automatically. Another was the Ted Lindsay Trophy, which the players madly appreciate and about which McDavid said that he might be more prestigious for him than the Hart Trophy. The fact is that the owner of this prize is determined not by the press, but by the hockey players themselves, and their opinion, of course, is of particular value.

With other notable nominations, the story was about the same. Let’s say that hardly anyone seriously thought that the Norris Trophy for the strongest defender would float away from the hands Erik Karlsson. His San Jose Sharks failed in the regular season, but Karlsson himself gave an impressive performance in terms of performance. He has 101 points. And none of the NHL defenders has reached the hundred-point line since 1992, when he submitted to Brian Leach.

Statistics, the most obvious among the factors, ensured victory in the competition of coaches Jim Montgomerythe mentor of the winner of the regular season, again – with record numbers, the Boston Bruins, and in the rookie competition – Matty Benirsu from the Seattle Kraken. She also turned compatriot Karlsson into a 100% favorite in the goalkeeper competition Linus Ullmark. It’s hard to get past the lead in terms of average goals conceded per game, wins and percentage of shots saved.

In this nomination, Ilya Sorokin finished second behind Ullmark in voting, and this was a worthy assessment for the breakthrough season of the Russian goalkeeper.

Even during the championship, experts showed unanimity that if it were not for Sorokin, the New York Islanders would not even qualify for the playoffs: the team looked too mediocre, but the goalkeeper often pulled it up.

Another thing is that the Vezina Trophy was the only prize that the domestic hockey player was at least close to. And this is an unexpected situation. The last season, following the results of which none of the Russians was awarded, ended in 2011. After that, they were sure to receive an award. And, as a rule, there were several laureates. But the last season of the series was interrupted.

Alexey Dospekhov