The Hart Memorial Trophy crowns the Most Valuable Player in the NHL every year since 1972. Greats like Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, and Alexander Ovechkin have won the award multiple times, cementing their legacies as some of the best to step foot on the ice. This year’s race, however, is one of the tightest ones we’ve seen in recent history. It’s a four-way competition between Connor McDavid (winner of three Hart trophies since 2017), Auston Matthews (2022 Hart winner), Nikita Kucherov (2019 Hart winner), and Nathan MacKinnon (2022 Stanley Cup champion).
The first Hart trophy won by Auston Matthews in 2022 was after he became the first player to score sixty goals since Steven Stamkos in 2012. This year he’s on pace to hit seventy goals, something that hasn’t been done since Teemu Selanne’s rookie season when he scored seventy-six goals. You’d think this would make him an automatic lock to take home the Hart, but lack of point production aside from his goals has him trailing the other three contenders. With only twenty-seven assists along with fifty-five goals in sixty-five games, Matthews point total is a mere eighty-two with seventeen games left.
On the other hand, MacKinnon is leading the league with 116 points, Kucherov is right on his tail with 114, and McDavid has stormed back into the race with 106 points at the time this article was written. So, the question arises, how do you pick the winner? The argument for Kucherov is that he’s contributed a point on 50% of Tampa’s goals scored this season. Half of the goals the entire Tampa Bay Lightning team have scored, have been a result of Kucherov’s shot or playmaking. That is insane, considering there are eighteen other skaters contributing to the team’s goal scoring. However, maybe it’s the subpar performance of the repeat champions from 2020-2021 that is holding Kucherov back. MacKinnon is leading his team in a tough Central division, currently sitting tied with the Jets for first in the division. McDavid, ten points behind MacKinnon and sitting eight points behind the Canucks for top spot in the Pacific, seems to be trailing behind both Kucherov and MacKinnon for best odds to win the Hart.
There is still a lot of hockey to be played and each player can turn this race around, but what we can say is that it’s a very close race and there isn’t a clear winner until the trophy is handed out in June.