Connor McDavid absolutely cleaned up at the NHL Awards last night, but the thing a lot of people were focused on as the evening wrapped up was the fact that one of the PWHA members ranked him as the fifth-best player last season in the Hart Trophy voting. Yeah, you read that right. Fifth. Hilarious.

As much as I really don’t care about the NHL Awards nor do I think the players should either, I have to admit that I laughed out loud when I saw that one of the voting writers had Connor McDavid listed as the fifth-best player in the NHL last season. Again, this isn’t something we should be spending much time thinking about — everyone that actually watched hockey last season knows Connor McDavid was the best player in the league — but to suggest that there were four players better than him seems beyond ridiculous.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 12 months, let me remind you that the 153 points Connor McDavid put up during the 2022-23 season were the most by any player since the 90s. Let that sink in for a minute before we move on… In the span of decades (DECADES!), no National Hockey League player outside of the EA Sports universe has scored more points over an 82-game season than our beloved captain, and yet still there was someone out there that felt there were four players better than him. How does that make sense? Did this mystery writer not watch any games last year? It’s fair to ask, in my opinion.

Even if one truly believed that David Pastrnak was the best player last season — Pasta was the only other player to receive a first-place vote, obviously from our new friend — the fact that you put Connor McDavid in fifth place instead of second or third boggles the mind. Put another way, having Connor McDavid in five hole on your ballot is kinda like suggesting my old Chrysler Dynaster I had in high school is a better luxury car option than the Alfa Romeo Stelvio I’m driving now. Sure, they’re both cars that got me from point A to B, but the reality is that one of them is a significant upgrade over the other even though they’re technically the same product.

Either way, it’s decisions like this one by that lone writer that further cement the Ted Lindsay Award, in my mind, as the most prestigious trophy of the evening and it’s not even close. I mean, McDavid even said it in his acceptance speech that the award voted on by his peers is the one that matters the most, and there’s no better reason for why that is than seeing someone who can probably barely skate vote on who was the best player and get it as wrong as one possibly could. That all said, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t fascinated to see how long it’s going to take this specific voter to come out publicly and what possible reasons they will use to justify their choice — it’s going to be hilarious. I just can’t wait to see hear/read the mental gymnastics that are going to come out to try and make this look any less foolish. Is that even possible?

At the end of the day, no one is going to remember the fact that Connor McDavid didn’t win his third Hart Trophy by a unanimous vote so spending even this much time on someone’s poor judgement seems to be wasteful. That said, it’s hard not to see the way the votes were cast and chuckle about the results. Around these parts, we’re lucky enough to watch Connor McDavid do his thing on a nightly basis, and anyone that does the same already knows that he was the best player last year (and every year) so what does it matter what some anonymous writer thinks? The good news is that we’re only a day away from the NHL Draft and a few months away from having the boys roll back into town and get to work, meaning this will all be forgotten until next year when someone decides they’re smarter than everyone else and we can have this argument all over again.

On this specific Tuesday morning, however, all I can think about is how funny this is and how there’s someone cruising around Nashville right now that knows without a doubt that we’re all laughing at them. But hey, why should the NHL work with blogs like this one when you’ve got PHWA members that are clearly giving the league their full attention? Classic.

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