It’s that time of year! The ’18-19 NHL regular season ended on Saturday, and that means the time to argue about the NHL player awards has begun. Now of course, the actual awards are voted on by PHWA members, General Managers, and the NHL Broadcasters’ Association for each respective award. However, we (Josh and Luke) decided it would be interesting to see which players the HG writers (and fellow hockey statistics minds) would choose to win the various end-of-season awards. The group of voters is made-up of as many Hockey Graphs writers as we could pester into completing the annoyingly buggy google survey, along with various other writers and hockey people who are in some way associated with the hockey statistics community.
The group of voters includes: Ryan Stimson, Dom Luszczyszyn, Alex Novet, Mike Pfeil, petbugs, Prashanth Iyer, Sean Tierney, Shawn Ferris, Shayna Goldman, Chris Watkins, Us (Josh & Luke Younggren as one vote), Acting the Fulemin, Andrew Berkshire, Arvind, CJ Turtoro, Colin Cudmore, Daniel Wagner, Harman Dayal, Kent Wilson, Meghan Hall, Micah McCurdy, Mike Murphy, Olivier Bouchard, Scott Cullen, Stephen Burtch, and Sunil Agnihotri. That’s 27 voters total.
We used the same voting method as the actual NHL awards. For the Hart Memorial Trophy, James Norris Memorial Trophy, Calder Memorial Trophy, Frank J. Selke Trophy, and the Lady Byng Memorial Trophy (the prominent PHWA awards), five votes (1st – 5th place) were provided by each participant and the votes were weighted (10-7-5-3-1 from 1st to 5th place) to arrive at the total score for each player. The Vezina trophy is voted on by the NHL GMs and only has three votes (1st – 3rd place) – 5-3-1 weights are used. For the Jack Adams Award, we chose to use the same method as the Vezina voting because frankly, neither of us could find how the award is determined (besides the fact that the NHL Broadcasters’ Association votes for this one).
Here are the NHL’s definitions for each award:
Hart: the player judged to be the most valuable to his team
Calder: the player selected as the most proficient in his first year of competition in the National Hockey League
Norris: the defenseman who demonstrates throughout the season the greatest all-round ability in the position
Vezina: the goalkeeper adjudged to be the best at this position
Selke: the forward who best excels in the defensive aspects of the game
Lady Byng: the player adjudged to have exhibited the best type of sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct combined with a high standard of playing ability
Jack Adams: the NHL coach adjudged to have contributed the most to his team’s success
The winners:
- Hart: Nikita Kucherov
- Norris: Mark Giordano
- Vezina: John Gibson
- Calder: Elias Pettersson
- Selke: Mark Stone
- Lady Byng: Aleksander Barkov
- Jack Adams: Jon Cooper
The full results:
All of the individual ballots can be found here. We didn’t intend for this to be a post that included anything other than the results. However, we feel it is important that we acknowledge the Brad Marchand vote for Lady Byng as well as the 1st place Frederik Andersen vote for Hart as those are amazing picks and should be respected. Please, as always, disagree with the voters respectfully.
Have fun!
– The Twins
Hockey Graphs 
You guys have no credibility putting Erik Karlsson over Brent Burns. That’s probably the worst but it’s still pretty terrible putting Burns behind Rielly, Letang, and Carlson. What a joke. 83 points in 82 games by a d-man hasn’t been done since 1995-96.
What are you using to determine your personal Norris ballot, Bret?
I’ve not done an in-depth look at what my voting for the Norris would be but no matter how one slices it, putting Erik Karlsson who played almost 30 fewer games than Brent Burns is absurd for an award that is the best overall defenseman throughout the regular season. Burns and Karlsson are similar type of players with similar advanced metrics but one guy was obviously better to most Sharks fans and healthy for the entire season whereas one missed almost 30 games. The games played difference alone puts Burns over Karlsson to any objective voter for this award. It’s one thing if it’s Hedman missing 12 games. Missing almost half the season is another. There’s really no legitimate argument for anyone to be putting Karlsson over Burns.