NHL Awards

Mirtle has a great series of posts up that explore the voting for the various NHL awards. Just assume any numbers you see here are using his numbers.

The only current Sabres to receive a vote in any of the various categories were found in the Lady Byng, which is the least important award I can even imagine, and the Selke (defensive forward).

For the Byng, Pominville finished third, with Daniel Paille receiving a second-place vote, Jochen Hecht getting a third, and Tim Connolly receiving a fifth.

Pominville, Paille and Derek Roy (WTFZOMG?) also received votes for the Frank Selke Award.

Pretty lame showing, all in all.

Somehow, Brian Campbell finished fifth in the Norris voting, with one writer actually giving him a first-place vote. I would like very much to meet the writer who would take Brian Campbell of Nicklas Lidstrom or Zdeno Chara.

No Sabre, or recent ex-Sabre like Briere, Campbell and the like received a vote for the Hart Trophy (MVP), nor did any of them really deserve one. Briere had a tough regular season, but I thought he might garner a few votes. Other than that it would be hard to claim any Sabre as one of the top-five players in the league.

Also interesting was the fact that Ryan Miller didn’t receive a single vote for the Vezina, while the goalie he is most often compared to, Henrik Lundqvist, received a first-place vote and eight third-place votes. In all, 11 goalies received at least one vote, including Chris Osgood. Must be a make-up vote for his playoff performance, because his regular season stats weren’t anything to write home about.

I’m not sure that (no votes for Miller) means anything, especially considering the Norris voting and the difference between that and reality, but it does mean that Miller isn’t viewed by the hockey writers in quite the same way we (or many of us) view him.

As an interesting to me aside, we spotted Larry Quinn at Sterling Place on Friday night. Cheers for eating a burger at the bar, plus hanging out and watching baseball; Jeers for splitting the burger with the wife.