It'll Be A Dogfight For The Hart Between MacKinnon And Draisaitl - But Here's Why Draisaitl Has The Edge

Entering Wednesday, Nathan MacKinnon had a five-point lead (102-97) over Edmonton’s Leon Draisaitl in the NHL scoring race. MacKinnon is the defending Hart Trophy winner, but if the vote were held today, I think Draisaitl would win.

Voting for the NHL trophies happens right after the NHL regular season is over, with something like a two- or three-day deadline to submit ballots. It is a vote on the NHL’s most valuable player in the regular season.

I’m not a traveling beat writer anymore, so I don’t have a vote for trophies anymore. I probably would abstain from voting anyway, as a few years ago the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association, in all its un-wisdom, limited the number of voters to 100 and thus left off a teeming number of veteran writers in favor of, um, let’s just call them not-as-qualified media people. The PHWA became an ignorant, biased organization a few years ago, with horrible leadership, and I would refuse to have anything to do with them no matter what. The top two position holders in the PHWA aren’t even real writers anymore. If that offends them, I couldn’t give a flying Eff. It’s true.