Washington as a team and Ovechkin as an individual both got fat on the terrible Southwest division that year, and then, big surprise, crashed out in the 1st round against the 8th seeded Habs. They were terribly overrated by their regular season record, and everybody knew it.
They got fat
ter against the southeast, but their point% of .698 in games against the other 24 teams, was still good for 1st overall.
Out west, San Jose had the best regular season record, but the Canucks were the better team. The main difference between them was that the Sharks got a lot of points from overtime losses. Chicago was probably the best regular season (and overall) team that year, but the Hawks had no viable Hart candidates. You act like Henrik's Hart was such a terrible injustice, but it just wasn't. He was the best player on one of the elite teams that wasn't a total mirage, and he won the Art Ross
.
He won the Ross by 3 points, over two players with significantly more goals. 3 points is nothing, and they were easily more valuable offensively than he was.
Do you really think that he'd have still won it if he had two fewer points and Crosby/Ovy had two more? Despite all three players having essentially the same season, a lot of votes would have swung. That points race is far too important to those reporters.
There have been far more questionable awards handed out than that one, but here we are talking about Henrik Sedin. Nitpicking his Hart is just another way of dinging modern players with respect to oldies about whom we don't have enough specific information to question the voters.
No it's not, it's dinging him with respect to the modern players who were actually better and more deserving. It has nothing to do with oldies at all.
The main problem with the THN list is that it was horrible, not that some of the players in the 51-100 range were only on a few ballots. You do realize that the level of exclusivity you seem to want here would preclude us from looking at any awards voting beyond about the top-5, right?
Yeah, I do realize that I'm saying that. It's not like that every single year, but in a lot of years we have a tendency to draw some really shady conclusions based on what a very small percentage of writers thought.
Is 18% of the ballots really not good enough for you?
Is 7% really good enough for you?
Henrik got four top-3 votes in both of the seasons in question. I think that's enough to be considered significant, yes.
So, four writers (who may have all been from Vancouver, for all we know) out of a total of 123-149 thought he was a top-3 player. Thus, it's automatically reasonable to conclude he was one of the 10 most valuable players in the league? I'm actually really surprised that this isn't a line of thinking you'd be railing
against and trying to change.
You're evidently suggesting we throw out a lot of data, which I think would be foolish.
It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if we did. But a more reasonable thing to do would be to call these insignificant fringe votes what they are - an extremely small piece of the puzzle.
We can be more forgiving for older players we never saw, sure, because these few votes can be somewhat enlightening. There were fewer teams and so the writers saw the players more often, and they were a lot less stat-based. As I demonstrated to you earlier in this draft, Hart voting for forwards has followed the points race ridiculously closely since the lockout.
