TAMPA, Fla. — The strange thing about the NHL’s Most Valuable Player is that he did not lead the league in scoring. Connor McDavid did. Nikita Kucherov finished second to him in total points and won the Hart Trophy anyway, which tells you something about how thin the line between the two has become, and how close this vote was.
Kucherov claimed his second Hart Memorial Trophy this week, the award handed to him in a surprise under the lights at the Tampa Bay Lightning’s facility. He becomes one of a short list of two-time winners, and he did it in the closest MVP race the league has staged in more than two decades.
The margin was almost nothing. Kucherov finished with 1,436 voting points to McDavid’s 1,426, a gap of ten, with Nathan MacKinnon close behind at 1,297, according to ESPN. Kucherov took 72 of the 198 available first-place votes, and for the first time since the current points system began in 1995-96, all three finalists drew at least a quarter of the first-place ballots. This was not a coronation. It was a photo finish.
The case for Kucherov lived in the rate, not the total. He put up 130 points, 44 goals and 86 assists, in 76 games, and led the entire league at 1.71 points per game. McDavid played more and scored more in aggregate; Kucherov, when he was on the ice, was the most productive player in hockey on a per-minute basis. The voters, narrowly, decided that efficiency at that altitude was the more valuable thing, which is the kind of judgment that could have gone the other way on ten ballots.
That it went to Kucherov at all is a quiet statement about longevity. He has been one of the best players in the world for the better part of a decade, long enough that a second MVP in his thirties reads less as a breakout than as a verdict on a whole career. The first Hart announced him. The second confirms that the first was not an accident.
The award also lands in a strange week for the league, with the Stanley Cup Final still being decided between Carolina and Vegas, two teams that are not Tampa Bay. There is a melancholy in an individual honor handed out while someone else plays for the trophy that matters most, and Kucherov, who has lifted the Cup before, knows the difference better than the vote does. The Hart is the consolation the regular season offers the player who was its best. It is not the one the year is remembered for.
What the closeness of the vote leaves open is whether this is settled or merely paused. McDavid has finished second in an MVP race he led in scoring, MacKinnon is a vote swing away, and the three of them have spent years trading the title of the league’s best player without any of them holding it for long. Kucherov has it now, by ten points. The margin is small enough that nobody in that group will treat the question as closed, which is its own kind of compliment to all three.
