LB-Hockey

Awards season is upon us. And what better time to launch a new tradition here: the (hopefully) yearly LB-Hockey Awards. Throughout this series, we’ll be perusing through the major NHL Awards and potentially some new entries. Thanks to a mixture of the site’s visualizations, model outputs, and various cherry-picked stats, we will scour the pool of candidates for each award before crowning a worthy winner. Now, with all that babbling out of the way, let us begin with the most reputable award in this series: the Hart.

The Village

Although the main focus throughout this season has been the battle at the top, we will start by establishing who still had very strong seasons and deserve to appear on some ballots. First is the only player on the radar whose team did not qualify for the playoffs, although not for a lack of effort from this candidate. In what was a disappointing season for Pittsburgh, Sidney Crosby willed the Penguins into a fight for the final wildcard spot that just barely got out of reach on the last night of the season.

Even more impressive is how this was done following the partial absence of Sid’s two most prominent running mates. Jake Guentzel’s injury & trade to Carolina seemingly marked the end of their attempt to push for a spot, while Bryan Rust’s injury certainly did not help. Nonetheless, #87 thrived and helped the latter achieve what was arguably a career-best season overall.

Crosby’s been a model of consistency, as his SPAR has ranked at the 98th percentile every season since 2020-21 in the LB-Hockey model. Defying the age curve, Crosby has even improved a little relative to the last couple of years in terms of his scoring, checking, and zone exit games. He has truly cemented himself as the far and away best 35+ player in the league, undoubtedly earning him votes on some ballots.

Artemi Panarin on the other hand, did not have a deficiency of potent linemates around him. The Panarin-Trocheck-Lafrenière has been the most prominent in the league this season. At 863 minutes, they have seen the ice more than any other forward trio by almost 100 minutes.
Similarly to Crosby however, he carried his teammates to new heights with both Trocheck (77) and Lafrenière (57) reaching career-best point totals. The latter especially can attribute a fair bit of his successful breakout season and chatter as one of the most improved players in the league to the Bread Man.

Panarin himself broke the 100-point barrier for the first time. Smashing it would probably be more accurate as he finished 4th in the league with 120 points, behind only three other guys who we will talk about soon. That scoring was quite timely as well, ranking in the top 10 this season for the Clutch Score component of the model which takes into account important goals, playoff performance, and 6v5 defending.

What may stand out the most however from this year is his uptick in goals. After hitting 32 goals in his first season with the Rangers, Panarin had been unable to reach 30 again. That all changed this year as he nearly eclipsed the prestigious 50-goal mark, finishing one shy in the end. Much of that success can be attributed to his scorching shot and off-puck movement in the offensive zone, turning him into one of the biggest one-timer threats in the league.

Although he was not nominated for the Hart, he still has a strong chance at winning the big one this month, at the time of writing this anyway (edit: welp).

While the final four later on will continue to be filled exclusively with forwards, that isn’t to say that there aren’t any worthy defensemen or goalies. Quinn Hughes & Connor Hellebuyck will be talked about more in the Norris & Vezina parts of this series but they absolutely need to be mentioned here.

To really show how Hughes embodies the “MVP” quality of the Hart, let’s take a look at one of the metrics in the main cards. The “Importance to Teammate Offence” statistic is calculated by creating networks of players for a given team & game. The edges that connect these player nodes are based on passes between them and weighted depending on the pass’s direction, its distance to a shot attempt, and this resulting shot attempt’s scoring probability. By taking the Betweenness Centrality scores, we can see how much the network (team) would suffer if any given node (player) was removed, showing how important they are.

The fellow nerds can read more about it if they want, but suffice it to say, that Quinn Hughes sports the highest Betweenness Centrality amongst all players in the league this season. He has been the ultimate play-connecter and as a result, the offence in Vancouver flowed through him.

Connor Hellebuyck took a different route to stake his claim, by simply stopping almost everything he could. In terms of volume, rates, and raw performance output, Hellebuyck stands easily ahead of the goalie competition. Total goals saved above expected? First. Goals saved above replacement per game? First. Regulation plus overtime wins? First.

The Castle

Now it’s time to delve into the inner circle, the guys who have a legitimate claim to the title. Depending on who you ask, this has either been a 3 or 4 horse race for league MVP. Although Auston Matthews did not get a Hart nomination like the other three, he did get some recognition by receiving one for the Ted Lindsay.

Looking purely at his finishing metrics, he simply outclassed all other shooters in the league. Returning to MoneyPuck’s data, his total goals (69) surpassed the adjusted expected goal amount by over 22. That is roughly 3 more than second place and 6 more than third. While a lot of that can be attributed to his ability to create and get open for chances, his shot also deserves praise. His wristers and snapshots are devastating, being capable of finishing at an above-average rate everywhere in the offensive zone.

His domination this season boils down to more than goal-scoring alone. A top 3 Selke finish and a refined checking game showcase how complementary of a style he plays for the typical dynamic puck-carrying playmaker. All this helps explain why he holds the 2nd highest Compatibility score in the model this season and figures in the top 2 ideal linemates for nearly every top forward in the league.

The fact that he accomplished all of this and scored the most goals in a season since Teemu Selanne’s 76 in 1992-93, and was not a Hart finalist, is a testament to how fantastic this group of MVP contenders is.

This season marks the fourth in a row where Connor McDavid makes an appearance as a Hart finalist. He is the only player who has ranked in the 100th percentile in standings points contributed every year since 2020-21 here at LB-Hockey. The reigning MVP is the best player in the sport, that is agreed upon by the vast majority of the league. However, whether he had the best individual season of all this year is up for debate.

Everything he does with the puck is at a generational level day in and day out. What isn’t being talked about enough is how well-rounded his game has become recently. He’s always been an excellent with-puck option in the defensive zone for retrieving and breaking out pucks. But now, his mind & stick skills have been getting applied to further situations, resulting in his suppression & checking numbers ranking very well.

Far and away his most impressive achievement this season was becoming the first player in over 30 years to hit the century mark for assists. Although Kucherov achieved this shortly after, McDavid did so with 5 fewer games on the season. This leads to my placement of him at third in my ballot. I do believe Connor had the best pace in terms of impact on his team. But given that he missed some games to injury, and that the two ahead of him were so close, it placed him third in a tight top 3.

Speaking of Kucherov, he earned the second spot on my end. The analysis for him is similar to McDavid’s: a 100-assist season and solid improvements on the defensive & checking aspects of the game. What’s most impressive about the latter is how it has progressed from being at the bottom of the league, and now in the acceptable-to-average range.

Although the dashboard above illustrates this, it might not even do his development enough justice since the data is portrayed in percentiles which notably underestimates the difference at the extremes of a dataset.

Back to the production side of things, Kucherov has everything you’d want from a worthy Hart winner. We haven’t mentioned his 44 goal total, and more importantly, his 144 points which won him the Art Ross trophy. Comparing that to the rest of his team, he finished with 54 more points than 2nd place on the Lightning (held by Brayden Point).

In terms of being most valuable to your team, that portfolio is hard to top. And any other year, that likely would have been enough. However, this was not any other season…

The Throne

At last, let’s crown a winner and award the 100th Hart Trophy.

The way you interpret the Hart’s definition can unquestionably change how you select your ballot. And in a season with one of the best crops of finalists where differentiating between incredible accomplishments gets increasingly difficult, the impact of that interpretation grows.

We’ve just gone over how Kucherov could easily fit the definition of being the most valuable player to his team across the entire regular season. One could even argue that the Lightning don’t even make the playoffs without him.

By looking exclusively through this lens however, this narrows down the field of winning candidates to players on bubble teams. It unfairly punishes those who either massively helped their team finish higher up in the standings, or thrived despite being dealt a poor hand in terms of team quality.

As a result, here at LB-Hockey we identify the most valuable player to his team by being the one who provided the most value to it, not the one whose performance resulted in the most drastic outcome for their team. Since a lot of the factors impacting the latter are out of the player’s hands, this is how we decided to evaluate the race.

Taking all this into consideration, we’ve got Nathan MacKinnon just barely edging out the competition to claim the LB-Hockey Awards’s Hart Trophy for the 2023-24 season. The only player who can rival McDavid as the most dynamic player in the league, MacKinnon was simply shot out of a cannon this year.

For the first time in the last five seasons, he was able to get a full season under his belt and show everyone how absolutely dominant his production could be over an 82-game span. The result? Some simply ridiculous counting stats:
– 140 points (2nd in the league)
– 51 goals (4th in the league)
– 405 shots on goal (1st in the league)
– 22:49 ice time per game (2nd amongst forwards, only 5 seconds behind Rantanen and over a minute more than 3rd place)

While these are volume-based statistics rather than per-minute rates, they help further his cause of having provided the most value. And even then, looking at some more advanced metrics, he remains a dominant force. Across the entire league in our dataset, nobody created at a higher rate in transition than MacKinnon as he sported the highest expected goals and expected primary points per 60 off the rush (xG/60 & xPTS1/60).

Watching him play, that is never in doubt. MacKinnon embodies the expression of “galloping” when he’s skating with the puck. He constantly forces opposing defenders on their heels with his overpowering speed and stick-handling prowess. That was never more on display than during his hat trick game against Minnesota where he also scored his 50th of the season. Every single goal saw him dart past the defence with scorching intensity:

Once again, I can’t overstate how close of a finish this was. Looking at overall impact provided in the LB-Hockey model, quantified by players’ SPAR Pace adjusted for actual games played (so total standings points contributed), MacKinnon barely leads the pack. Kucherov is only under 3 tenths of a standings point back, while McDavid missing out on a small chunk of games puts him back at third despite leading in SPAR Pace. Finally, Matthews sits just outside the top 3 to close out this grouping which stands far ahead of the pack in terms of SPAR contributions on the season.

Everyone here is worthy of consideration as the league MVP, and it will likely be a long time before we can say that again for a future season. So we should count ourselves lucky that we were able to witness the excellence that was this Hart Trophy race.