Hart winner vs Art Ross winner (1948-2023)

Hockey Outsider

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This thread has been updated for 2018.

Taylor Hall won the Hart. It's only the third time in NHL history (back to 1948, anyway) where a forward has won the Hart while finishing outside of the top five in scoring. I provide some possible explanations for that in post #1.

Connor McDavid finished 5th in Hart voting, while winning the Art Ross. That's a below average result (only 7 out of 70 Art Ross winners have finished worse than 5th).
 

Ishdul

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I don't think it's accurate to say that MacKinnon faltered down the stretch. He had 26 points in his final 19 games, virtually identical to Hall, and probably helped his candidacy a lot by getting Colorado into the playoffs at the end, and even played particularly dominantly in the decisive game against the Blues at the end of the season. He got hurt in February, but Hall got hurt in January and only played 2 more games than him in total.

MacKinnon himself wouldn't have been far off from this conversation, being 5th in scoring as a mainly offensive centre. I sort of wonder how the binary nature of the Art Ross affected the voting. The Oilers being out of it by January meant that McDavid never really had a shot at the award, If McDavid got hurt and Giroux came on to win the Art Ross (as opposed to finishing 2nd) at the end while leading his own team to the playoffs does he get the Hart instead of finishing 4th? It's pretty odd that after a few years where scoring 100 points meant you won the Hart in a landslide we had 3 100 point players, none of which were nominated.
 

Hockey Outsider

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I see what you mean, but I was referring the very end of the season. Yes, MacKinnon was great in the very last game of the season, but he only scored 3 points in Colorado's last seven games (leading up to game #82), as they lost five of seven (four of those in regulation).

Yes, I know - it's a small, cherry-picked sample, but the awards voters love narratives, and I think this may have made the difference. (Hall had 15 points in his last eight games, and New Jersey had seven victories and an OT loss).

I agree, though - the Hart race was strange this year. There were at least seven legitimate candidates, but all had obvious flaws.
 

Hockey Outsider

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Updated for 2019. As expected, Nikita Kucherov, the Art Ross trophy winner, won the Hart. Still, I don't think he's too happy about how this season ended.

11 of the past 16 Hart winners, going back to 2003, also won the Art Ross trophy (14 of the past 16 were in the top three in scoring - the exceptions being Carey Price and Taylor Hall).
 

Hockey Outsider

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Updated for 2020. Leon Draisaitl won the Hart and Art Ross trophies. As noted above, this happens a bit more than half the time (56%), going back to the Truman administration. But that doesn't tell the full story. Going back to 2003, the same player won the Hart and Art Ross trophy 12 of the past 17 seasons. The five other players were Alexander Ovechkin (2009 and 2013), Corey Perry (2011), Carey Price (2015) and Taylor Hall (2018) - three of whom didn't make the playoffs.
 
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Hockey Outsider

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Also, here's the Hart trophy "narrative flowchart" for every season from 2001 to 2020:

upload_2020-9-22_11-14-38-png.368467
 

buffalowing88

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I love this and how much your list has evolved into a flowchart. I still think that of the more recent finishes, the Sedin and Perry picks consecutively baffle me to this day. Perry in particular.
 
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vadim sharifijanov

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I love this and how much your list has evolved into a flowchart. I still think that of the more recent finishes, the Sedin and Perry picks consecutively baffle me to this day. Perry in particular.

i think the pattern there is, "were you the hottest player in the league over the last month or two?"

would also apply to thornton 2006, forsberg 2003, and arguably theodore 2002 (though actually bertuzzi was the hottest player in the league down the stretch).
 

Professor What

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First, I want to say that there's some really good work in this thread, including the flow chart. That said, the whole flow chart thing bothers me, but not in any way that is the OP's fault. It just bothers me that the voters' thought process can be boiled down to something like that. I'm not saying that those factors can't be used to help make the decision, because they certainly can, but too much of a reliance on them, which it feels to me that many voters have causes some problems, imo. The most glaring one is the lack of defensemen winning the Hart.

I'm on record here stating that I think there are only certain circumstances in which I think goalies should win the Hart since a very technical reading of the rules could result in it nearly becoming a second Vezina. But, the fact remains that there are circumstances when they should win the Hart. There are circumstances when players of every position should win it, so why were there 26 years between Babe Pratt and Bobby Orr winning the Hart, 28 years between Hart and Pronger, and now 20 years since Pronger? I think there's too much of a focus on raw offensive numbers, and that unfairly nearly eliminates defensemen from winning.
 

Hockey Outsider

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First, I want to say that there's some really good work in this thread, including the flow chart. That said, the whole flow chart thing bothers me, but not in any way that is the OP's fault. It just bothers me that the voters' thought process can be boiled down to something like that. I'm not saying that those factors can't be used to help make the decision, because they certainly can, but too much of a reliance on them, which it feels to me that many voters have causes some problems, imo.

For the record, I don't take the flowchart too seriously. But there are some pretty obvious patterns in how the voters pick the winners, and I wanted to see how well it would hold up. Obviously I had to manufacture some of rules (such as Hall's win), and there's no guarantee it will hold up in the future. But it's somewhat disheartened that nearly two decades of Hart trophy winners can be identified with such a simple chart. It raises the question - how much value are the award voters really adding if their choices are so predictable?

(I'm not sure if anyone is familiar with Darryl Shilling - he had a fantastic website 15+ years ago with all types of cutting-edge (for the time) analytics work. He said he had, but never published, a Hart trophy prediction formula. He spot-checked it on 10-15 years worth of data from roughly 1950 to 2004, and he found it had about a 90% accuracy rate).
 

TheDevilMadeMe

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For the record, I don't take the flowchart too seriously. But there are some pretty obvious patterns in how the voters pick the winners, and I wanted to see how well it would hold up. Obviously I had to manufacture some of rules (such as Hall's win), and there's no guarantee it will hold up in the future. But it's somewhat disheartened that nearly two decades of Hart trophy winners can be identified with such a simple chart. It raises the question - how much value are the award voters really adding if their choices are so predictable?

(I'm not sure if anyone is familiar with Darryl Shilling - he had a fantastic website 15+ years ago with all types of cutting-edge (for the time) analytics work. He said he had, but never published, a Hart trophy prediction formula. He spot-checked it on 10-15 years worth of data from roughly 1950 to 2004, and he found it had about a 90% accuracy rate).

I'm sure Pronger's 2000 win messes with predictions (and is why you started in 2001). A case of no particularly strong seasons by either forwards or goalies plus an above average quality Norris season plus a media narrative that developed about how they had been underrating defensemen forever - harder to fit that unique year into a flow chart.
 

Hockey Outsider

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I'm sure Pronger's 2000 win messes with predictions (and is why you started in 2001). A case of no particularly strong seasons by either forwards or goalies plus an above average quality Norris season plus a media narrative that developed about how they had been underrating defensemen forever - harder to fit that unique year into a flow chart.

Definitely - the fact that I started in 2001 was 100% cherry-picking. Pronger is the only defenseman other than Orr to win the Hart in 70+ years (as of 2020), so that's tough to predict. As you mentioned, the fact that the best player missed a quarter of the season hurt his chances for the Hart (which was also the case in 1992 and 2013 - but not 1993).

Another year that would be tough to predict is 1997. Most of the precedent suggests that Lemieux was likely to win. It's rare to see a goalie win the Hart in general, especially when it's over someone who led the league by a healthy (13 point) margin, on a playoff team. (I could manipulate the rules to "predict" Hasek to win the 1997 and 1998 Harts, but that would probably result in him being predicted to win the 1999 Hart as well).
 

Professor What

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For the record, I don't take the flowchart too seriously. But there are some pretty obvious patterns in how the voters pick the winners, and I wanted to see how well it would hold up. Obviously I had to manufacture some of rules (such as Hall's win), and there's no guarantee it will hold up in the future. But it's somewhat disheartened that nearly two decades of Hart trophy winners can be identified with such a simple chart. It raises the question - how much value are the award voters really adding if their choices are so predictable?

(I'm not sure if anyone is familiar with Darryl Shilling - he had a fantastic website 15+ years ago with all types of cutting-edge (for the time) analytics work. He said he had, but never published, a Hart trophy prediction formula. He spot-checked it on 10-15 years worth of data from roughly 1950 to 2004, and he found it had about a 90% accuracy rate).

The only reason I take the chart "seriously," is the fact that you pretty much pegged 20 years of voting with it. Kudos for picking up on the pattern, bit it's ridiculous that it was there to pick up on. I've long felt that the voters are pretty shallow as a group, and this doesn't do anything to change my mind on it. I've also long felt that if you had an informed, serious group of fans do the voting that it would often end up very different and would probably make a lot more sense. Interacting with people like those I've run into on here only reinforces that idea in my mind. Part of me would like to know what the voters think when they cast their ballots, but then again, I probably don't want to know.
 
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Hockey Outsider

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This thread has been updated for 2021. In a result that surprised nobody, McDavid won the Hart after taking the Art Ross.
 

Hockey Outsider

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This thread has been updated for 2022.

Auston Matthews won the Hart trophy. He finished 6th in scoring. This is one of only five times going back to 1948 that the Hart winner finished outside of the top five in scoring (excluding, of course, goalies).

The argument for Matthews seems to be he became the first player since Lemieux to score 50 goals in 50 games, he was "on pace" for 67 goals and 119 points, and he was good defensively. His goal-scoring was obviously impressive, but I don't find the latter two points very persuasive (but that's a discussion for another time).

It's also likely that Connor McDavid, despite winning the Art Ross by a solid eight point margin, was victim of sky-high expectations. After his extraordinary 2021 campaign, I don't think he was going to win Hart unless he ran away with the scoring race.

All that being said - even if I disagree with this year's result, it's encouraging that the voters are doing more than simply picking the Art Ross winner, which has happened almost 60% of the time going back to 1966.
 

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