Martin St. Louis for Jack Adams? Mitch Marner for Art Ross? We made 24 longshot award picks
Predicting the NHL award winners for the coming season can be a hit-and-miss exercise, to put it lightly.
Sometimes the obvious favorite wins, like Connor Bedard taking last year’s Calder. At -135 odds, that means the bookies thought he was more likely to win than everyone else combined, and sure enough he ran away with the award, to absolutely nobody’s surprise.
Other times, the winner is a little bit less obvious, but only a little. Last year’s Rocket Richard favorite was Connor McDavid, but Auston Matthew was right behind him at +300, which is to say 3-to-1 or a 25% chance – hardly a surprise winner. Nathan MacKinnon was 10-to-1 for the Hart, trailing only McDavid. Connor Hellebuyck’s Vezina (13-to-2) and Quinn Hughes’ Norris (10-to-1) were in the same range.
But we do get surprises, like Rick Tocchet winning the Jack Adams despite being a 25-to-1 preseason longshot, trailing behind 15 other coaches, including several like D.J. Smith, Todd McLellan and Jay Woodcroft who didn’t even make it through the season.
Tocchet became the latest in a long list of surprise award winners, at least based on those preseason odds. That preseason part is important, because many of those winners go on to feel like they were obvious or even inevitable, and it’s hard to remember that there was a time when nobody was expecting them. For example, when Leon Draisaitl won the Hart in 2020, he’d gone into the season as a 22-to-1 longshot. When Adam Fox won the Norris three years ago, he’d been listed at 35-to-1, well back of names like Torey Krug and John Klingberg. Marc-Andre Fleury was 40-to-1 for the 2021 Vezina, trailing behind Mikko Koskinen, while Linus Ullmark was 80-to-1 for the 2023 version, tied with Logan Thompson for 23rd place.
You get the idea. Every now and then, someone comes out of next-to-nowhere to win a major award, and nobody sees it coming.
Or do they? That’s the idea behind today’s post, as three of us -- Dom Luszczyszyn, Sean Gentille and Sean McIndoe -- are going to take our best swing at nailing a longshot. We’ll take eight of the major awards and limit ourselves to players who are listed at 20-to-1 or worse, and try to make the case for why our guy could shock everyone by taking home the hardware.
If we’re right, you’ll never hear the end of it. If we’re wrong, we’ll never bring it up again. Sounds like we can’t miss, so let’s take a shot at this.
(All historical odds are taken from Sports Odds History. All odds for this coming season are from Draft Kings, and were current as of publish date.)
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