It is January 6 and several NHL teams have played their 41st game of the 82-game regular season. The Calgary Flames even jumped the gun Thursday and became the first NHL team to play 42 – ironic, considering they are among the oldest teams in the league. (Slow down, Jarome Iginla, and bask in what remains of your Hall of Fame career!)
For our purposes, we will call this the halfway point – an opportune time to take stock of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Having voted in the last four postseason awards, I can attest that teams and players seem to rise and fall on a whim; for example, last year’s Hart Trophy winner, Corey Perry, wasn’t even in the conversation until he started playing like an elite player in January. There is no hardware at stake here.
So we’ll reserve the proper nomenclature on these awards for June. But if ballots were cast today …