No, the PHWA didn’t snub Connor McDavid

The finalists for the Hart Memorial Trophy were released on Friday, and, as expected, the Edmonton Oilers’ Connor McDavid didn’t make the cut.

The finalists for the Hart Memorial Trophy for the NHL’s “player adjudged to be most valuable to his team” have been announced — the New Jersey Devils’ Taylor Hall, Los Angeles Kings’ Anze Kopitar and Colorado’s Nathan MacKinnon.

Of course, the announcement only confirmed what Edmonton Oilers fans had long feared — that despite his 108 points (41 goals, 67 assists) in 82 games, McDavid would not be included in the Hart Trophy conversation this year because his team finished 17 points out of a playoff spot.

It’s not like there’s a hard-and-fast rule within the Professional Hockey Writer’s Association that a player whose team didn’t make the playoffs can’t be one of the final nominees for the Hart Trophy.

But the disconnect that exists between the fans and the writers when it comes to which players deserve to be nominated is that fans often think of the award as an individual achievement, while writers take it more literally — if a player is going to be deemed most valuable to his team, he should carry it into the postseason.

There is, of course, the player-voted Ted Lindsay Award for the league’s most outstanding player award, and — unsurprisingly — McDavid, along with MacKinnon and Hall, are the finalists for that award.

And some PHWA members take umbrage with the idea that they’ve “snubbed” McDavid and the Philadelphia Flyers’ Claude Giroux; as The Hockey News‘ Matt Larkin points out, the writers include five players on their ballots, and McDavid and Giroux were almost certainly Nos. 4 and 5 on almost all of them.

McDavid won the Art Ross Trophy for the second straight season as the league’s top scorer, amassing 41 goals and 67 assists for 108 points. He won the Hart Trophy last season — when, of course, the Oilers advanced to the postseason to face the San Jose Sharks.

It has to be especially frustrating for Oilers fans — or simply fans of McDavid — to know that, now, none of Hall, Kopitar and McKinnon are in contention for the Stanley Cup, either, all having been eliminated in the first round of the postseason.

Still, fans have to accept that the PHWA is going to take a team’s ability to contend very heavily into the equation of nominating Hart finalists. And, as Larkin pointed out, it’s not as though they closed their eyes and pretended McDavid didn’t exist; he was likely fourth or fifth on most ballots.

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Oilers fans should take pride in the fact that McDavid is regarded so highly among his fellow players as to be nominated for the Ted Lindsay Award, and accept that “the player adjudged to be most valuable to his team” isn’t always going to be the league’s most outstanding individual performer.