Lyons' look: The NHL awards were a joke
· Yahoo Sports
The NHL awards have been announced, and this is one of the worst groups of winners ever. The NHL award voters had clearly made up their minds about a quarter of the way into the season, and nothing was going to change their minds.
Jack Adams joke
Visit biznow.biz for more information.
To be fair to my first statement, most of the awards were truly not horrible. Zach Werenski winning his first Norris, Matthew Schaffer winning the Calder, Nick Suzuki winning the Selke, all perfectly reasonable. The Hart, the Jack Adams, the Vezina and the Bill Masterton are where the controversy comes in.
The first of the wrongfully awarded trophies was the Jack Adams. Almost every single NHL fan agrees (outside of Tampa Bay fans) that Jon Cooper winning the award is purely a legacy award.
To begin, Cooper didn’t even deserve to be one of the three nominees. He took a stacked Tampa Bay team and got them to exactly where they were expected to be. In fact, Cooper and the Lightning blew an eight-point division lead to the Buffalo Sabres, losing the division to a team that was dead last in the Eastern Conference in December.
It’s mind-boggling that the coach of a team that hit their expectations won the award for the best coach. You can go on and on about how Tampa Bay dealt with injuries, as if every other team did not. Even if the Lightning faced an absurd amount of injuries (they had fewer man-games lost than Buffalo and Pittsburgh), the team has one of the deepest lineups in the league. They are built to deal with injuries.
So, who did Cooper beat out for the award? Only two coaches who took teams projected to be bottom-10 in the league into the playoffs.
The second-place finisher (who lost by three votes because almost 50 award voters did not turn in a ballot) was Lindy Ruff of the Sabres.
Besides taking a team that was last place in the East to the playoffs, Ruff broke a 14-season playoff drought by winning the division over the Lightning. Breaking the 14-year drought on its own should have won Ruff the award, not to mention the insane turnaround Buffalo had.
Without any context from the season, the Sabres roster on paper is also not great. Not a bottom-feeding roster, but not one that says playoff team. Being able to win the division with a bad roster, the 20th-ranked power play and a team face-off percentage of 46.73, which was good for 30th in the league, is an incredible feat.
Even with everything Ruff did, the third-place finisher, Dan Muse of Pittsburgh, definitely had a case to win the award, much more so than Cooper.
Everyone, including the most diehard Penguins fans, projected Pittsburgh to be a bottom-five team. I mean, on paper, the opening roster was one of the worst. Outside of Sidney Crosby, who was going to score on the team? Evgeni Malkin had been slowing down, Kris Letang was a pylon, Erik Karlsson was even worse, and the rest of the roster was filled with bad journeymen.
Muse got through all of that, awful goaltending, a strong East, and still finished second in the Metro. His accomplishment is almost as great as what Ruff did.
Either way, both Ruff and Muse did much more, with much less, than what Cooper did with Tampa Bay, which leads conveniently into the next award.
The MVP
Nikita Kucherov took home the Hart for the MVP of the season. Kucherov certainly was elite this season with 130 points, but was he the most valuable player to his team? No.
The way I look at the MVP is like this: if you were to take the player off their team, would that team drastically suffer? If you take Kucherov off the Lightning, they are still a divisional playoff team.
As I stated earlier, Tampa Bay is a really deep team, and they still have an incredible goalie (which I will get to). By removing Kucherov from the Lightning this year, the team drops maybe three to six points, still easily sitting at 100 or more points.
Giving Kucherov the award is not the worst thing in the world, but other players had much better cases. Either way, this bolsters the point that Cooper did not deserve the Jack Adams. And my next point will make my case against Cooper even better.
Best in the crease
Finally, Andrei Vasilevskiy took home the Vezina Trophy as the league’s best goalie. There is nothing inherently wrong with him winning (even if that isn’t who I would have picked), but Vasilevskiy is a fine choice.
The reason I want to point out this award is to say that Cooper had the most valuable player in the league and the best goalie in the league.
Cooper’s Lightning is only the second team in NHL history to have the Hart, the Jack Adams and the Vezina winner on the same team in one year. The other was the 1977 Montreal Canadiens, who were a record-setting team. The only record-setting thing Cooper achieved this year was blowing his division lead.
I couldn’t care less that Cooper has never won the award, so “it’s his time.” He is a great coach and should have won the Jack Adams before, but awards are not for the past, now are they?
Ruff and Muse did way more than Cooper this season, by a landslide, and it is frankly an embarrassment from the award voters that Cooper won.
The only possible good thing that could come from Cooper winning the Jack Adams is that over the past few years, the winner regresses hard and is fired soon after. So, here is to hoping for the downfall of Cooper and Tampa Bay.