Its the biggest robbery in the history of the Hart. Nothing else comes even close.
The Penguins first made the playoffs in 88-89 entirely on the back of Mario... The Kings had made the playoffs two prior years to Gretz arriving, and it had Robataille and a like a half dozen crazy mofos from Sudbury like Dave Taylor and Ron Dugay. They were solid AF.
Total joke and slap in Mario the magnificents face.
My vote would have gone to Mario in 1989 for Hart as well, but I'm guessing the rationale would have included stuff like the following: LA made the playoffs the year before and PIT didn't, but PIT was a better team....was a divisional thing. LA lost a 55 goal scorer, 107pt guy when bringing in Gretzky and they were able to improve the team by 23pts. PIT went from having no one score 80pts the year before other than Mario to a team that had 2 other guys with 100+ pts and they only improved their record by 6pts.
I'm wondering if awarding him the Hart the year before when his team missed the playoffs played into it as well. Voter fatigue with Gretzky wining in 8 times in a row and could have won again. Lemieux won the scoring race, but likely only because Gretzky missed a lot of games. Voters could have gone either way there and had a good argument for Gretzky due to Lemieux missing the playoffs. I think winning the scoring race and Gretzky missing so many games was enough to offset though (I think if you miss more than 15 games you are getting close to that territory where it's tough to win the Hart. Also, Lemieux winning the Pearson over Gretzky in '86 was silly, so maybe people were thinking that too.....again, maybe voter fatigue that year. Funning thing is, the Hart voting in 1988 and 1989 wasn't particularly close, so the winner each year seemed to go without much controversy (1988 Lemieux had 54 1st place votes to Gretzky's 2 and in 1989 Gretzky had 40 1st pace votes to Lemieux's 18.