from David Staples of the Edmonton Journal,

Hart Trophy voters failed to pick the NHL’s MVP this year. Instead they picked the lead actors in comeback of the year narratives as the three finalists. I suppose we’re all suckers for a good story.

The three finalists for the Hart Trophy have a lot in common. Not one of them broke 100 points in scoring, even as three other players did so. All three of them led teams that had failed to make the playoffs in the 2016-17 season into the playoffs this year. And all three of them played on teams that quickly bombed out of the 2018 Stanley Cup playoffs, Taylor Hall’s New Jersey Devils in five games, Anze Kopitar’s Los Angeles Kings in four games and Nathan MacKinnon’s Colorado Avalanche in six games.

In picking the most valuable player, NHL hockey writers and broadcasters got distracted and swept away. They forgot to keep it simple and simply focus on picking the best and most valuable player in the league. Instead, the majority decided that team success — but only a certain kind of team success — was crucial. They limited their focus to the most compelling narrative, namely star players like Hall, Kopitar and MacKinnon who helped their formerly mediocre teams to scratch, battle and finally squeak into the 2018 playoffs.

In this way they overlooked the NHL’s most outstanding player, Connor McDavid from the lowly Edmonton Oilers, but they also overlooked exceptional candidates on the very best NHL teams, such as Evgeni Malkin of the Pittsburgh players, Blake Wheeler of the Winnipeg Jets, and Nikita Kucherov of the Tampa Bay Lightning.

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