We’re extremely excited to announce our 2010 NHL Year-End Awards Project. Over the last week, we’ve asked NHL bloggers from all over the internet to give us their take on the year-end awards. In the end, we have contributions from 44 writers representing blogs that come in all shapes and sizes. Here’s how the project is scheduled to go down. Feel free to follow our RSS Feed or get updates via Email so you don’t miss out on any of the results!
Monday, June 14: Norris Trophy (Defenseman of the Year)
Tuesday, June 15: “Mattias Norstrom” Award (Best Defensive Defenseman)
Wednesday, June 16: Selke Trophy (Best Defensive Forward)
Thursday, June 17: Vezina Trophy (Goaltender of the Year)
Friday, June 18: Hart Trophy (League MVP)
Of course, we did a couple of things differently than the normal NHL awards. Instead of asking for 3 finalists, we asked the bloggers to provide their 5 nominees for each award to get a deeper idea of players to recognize around the league.
We asked the bloggers to take into account the playoffs. We know the official awards only look at the regular season—but we wanted to take the entire year into account. They were instructed to look at the regular season, the playoffs, and even the Olympics if they thought it was appropriate (everyone views the awards differently). It was up to them how they wanted to interpret the awards and attack the ballots.
Secondly, we obviously created the “Mattias Norstrom Award”. For this, we asked the writers to vote on the best defensive defenseman. This was an award for the good defensemen around the league that don’t get the love they deserve, but people in their own towns know how valuable they are. The purpose was simply to give some respect to guys that don’t usually get it (similar to offensive linemen in football). Think Rob Scuderi last year for the Pens, Willie Mitchell in Vancouver, etc.
Lastly, we included a field for the bloggers to add any comments/explanations for each of the awards as they saw fit. To give a good cross-section of the thought-process behind the voting, we’ll include some of the bloggers comments as we release the winners each day.
We’ll take into account everyone’s votes. Here’s the breakdown of how we calculated the winner:
5 points for a 1st place vote
4 points for a 2nd place vote
3 points for a 3rd place vote
2 points for a 4th place vote
1 point for a 5th place vote
A huge thanks goes out to all of the bloggers that put in the time and effort to submit their votes. This project is only possible because of their willingness to participate. As you’ll see over the next week, there’s a great cross-section of hockey writers and bloggers that have vastly different opinions on just about every single award. We sincerely hope you enjoy checking these awards out as much as we enjoyed putting this project together!
Here’s a list of all of our contributors and where you can find them when they’re not voting for their home team’s players!
Matt Reitz is the Editor-In-Chief here at ViewFromMySeats.com and former NHL Writer for ProHockeyTalk on NBCSports. When he’s not shoving a mic in the face of NHLers or explaining why home teams should wear white, he’s usually trying to figure out what song to play next on his iPod. It’s a never-ending job.
