I’ll make you a deal: You indulge me in one of those “Slow News Summer” ideas I’ve had kicking around, and at the end I’ll surprise you with something weird that I found while researching it
Do we have a deal? Sure we do. Let’s start with the Carolina Hurricanes
As you may have heard, they won the Stanley Cup this year, the ultimate dream for every long-suffering hockey lifer and/or middle-schooler. And in doing so, they might have established themselves as the best team in the history of the NHL to not have a single Hall of Famer. We obviously can’t know that for sure yet, but I ran down the Carolina candidates a few weeks ago and included a reader poll, and the majority of you agreed that the Hurricanes might have a Hall, but don’t have anyone Hall-worthy.
But let’s take it one step further, with something we can quantify today: The Hurricanes also managed to win the Cup with a roster that didn’t receive so much as a single Hart Trophy vote. Surely they must also be the best team in that category, too
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In theory, we’re lowering the bar here by more than a bit. Getting into the Hall of Fame is hard — you need to put up a career worthy of the sport’s ultimate honor, and then you also have to sufficiently impress the mysterious committee and meet whatever criteria they’re using that year. A few questionable picks aside, making the Hall of Fame means you were a legend, or at least spent multiple years looking the part
But getting Hart votes? Like, any at all? That’s not all that hard. In the cap era, there were 129 ballots sent back for the 2006 awards, and that number has increased up to almost 200 in recent years. Winning the Hart is tough, sure. But getting even a single vote just means that one of those 200 or so voters thought you were worthy of a top-five mention. We’re talking about roughly 1,000 spots available on ballots around the league, and you only need to show up on one
That’s not easy, but it’s not exactly a monumental challenge. After all, the list of players who’ve had cap-era Hart votes includes Pascal Dupuis, Cam Atkinson, Radim Vrbata, William Karlsson and Marek Svatoš. And that’s not even getting to the goalies who caught a stray vote, a list that includes Daniel Vladař, James Reimer and the immortal Andrew Hammond
So yeah, this is going to be a lot tougher than the HHOF list, and clearly the Hurricanes doing it while winning the Cup will be a huge outlier. But let’s give it a try anyway. We’ll start at the dawn of the cap era in 2005 and work our way forward, flagging the best teams I could find that were completely shut out of the Hart love
2006-07 Stars
Record: 50-25-7, 107 points, tied for fifth best record overall
Playoffs: Lost in first round
Why’d they get shut out? Because I have no idea how this team was any good
Seriously, have a look at this roster. Nobody cracks 60 points, even though this was early in the cap era when scoring was up. The leading scorer is Mike Ribeiro. Only two guys even get to 20 goals. A 33-year-old Philippe Boucher ranks third in points, and he was a middle-pair defenseman
You’d see all that and probably think “Well, the goaltending must have been fantastic.” But not really. They played Marty Turco for 67 games, and his save percentage was a bit above league average, but he didn’t receive a single Vezina vote in a year when 10 guys did, including Chris Mason and Rick DiPietro
Coaching? Dave Tippett was good for a while, but he wasn’t a Jack Adams finalist that year. A PDO bender? This was pre-analytics, but the numbers we do have don’t seem all that out of the ordinary. I’m stumped
Who got snubbed? I’m mildly surprised that Turco didn’t get a vote tossed his way based on workload as much as anything else, but I can’t say anyone has a case for being robbed
2008-09 Chicago Blackhawks
Record: 46-24-12, 104 points, sixth overall
Playoffs: Won two rounds before being knocked out in the conference final
Why’d they get shut out? Because voters tend to err on the side of familiarity, and the Hawks hadn’t quite proven they were for real yet. They would, winning three of the next six Cup titles. But for now this near-dynasty was still finding its final form. The leading scorer is Martin Havlat, and Cristobal Huet is still getting half the starts in net
Who got snubbed? Nikolai Khabibulin’s numbers were excellent, but he only started 40 games. Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews weren’t quite there yet. If anyone deserved a vote or two, it’s 25-year-old Duncan Keith, who played over 25 minutes a night and finished sixth in Norris voting
2014-15 Canucks
Record: 48-29-5, 101 points, tied for eighth overall
Playoffs: Lost in first round
Why’d they get shut out?The first problem is the five loser points, tied for fewest in the league that year. Mix in a few more, and they nudge up the standings and look like a more impressive squad than the real standings say they are
But beyond that, this is a Canucks team caught between eras, with the Sedins still there and a few other remnants of their Cup contender years but also some new pieces that aren’t quite fitting. Ryan Miller is in goal, splitting time with Eddie Lack, and Radim Vrbata is the only player who has more than 20 goals
Who got snubbed? Both Sedins had plenty of Hart (and Lindsay) love by now, but both finish with 70-ish points and none of the other skaters really had a case. Miller was good, but Lack was actually a bit better, so there were no goalie votes coming. Honestly, it’s hard to argue with the voters, although I might have tossed one at this future podcaster
Carey Price finished third in Vezina voting, but doesn’t get a single Hart mention in 2017. (Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
2016-17 Rangers and Canadiens
Record: The Canadiens were 47-26-9 for 103 points, good for first in the Atlantic, while the Rangers finished 48-28-6 for 102 points
Playoffs: They played each other, with the Rangers winning in six. Is this the only time in NHL history that a pair of teams with 100+ points and zero combined Hart votes faced each other in the playoffs? No, as it turns out, but it’s exceedingly rare
Why’d they get shut out? While the Rangers had more wins, they only finished fourth in the Metro, and that usually doesn’t get you much Hart love unless you just barely make the playoffs, which wasn’t the case here. Nobody reached 60 points, the best defenseman is Ryan McDonagh, and Henrik Lundqvist has a good-but-not-great year by his standards
The Canadiens are a more interesting case, in part because they were a very weird team — this was the year they started 9-0-1 and then lost to the Blue Jackets 10-0. The forwards weren’t great, with Max Pacioretty leading the way with 35 goals and 67 points. Shea Weber finished sixth in Norris voting. But the real surprise is Carey Price, who started 62 games and posted a .923 save percentage. He finished third in Vezina voting, but doesn’t get a single Hart mention from anyone
Who got snubbed? Price, pretty clearly, and you can see what was happening here. Two years earlier, Price had been the rare goalie to actually win the Hart, earning 95 percent of voting points in the process. Apparently the voters figured once was enough; Price never actually got another Hart vote in his career after that 2015 run
2019-20 Blues
Record: One year after winning the Cup, the Blues went 42-19-10 in the COVID-shortened season, good for a 108-point pace over a full season and the second best mark in the league
Playoffs: They were part of that weird round robin thing in the bubble playoffs, then lost to the Canucks in round one
Why’d they get shut out?First things first — while the Cup-winning 2019 team was one of our nominations for best team without a Hall of Famer, they don’t qualify for this list because Ryan O’Reilly and Jordan Binnington both got some Hart votes. But not this year, as the entire team is shut out despite being the reigning champs
Who got snubbed?: The best candidate is Alex Pietrangelo, who leads the team in average ice time by over a minute and finishes fourth in Norris voting. It was one of eight times in his career that he got Norris votes, but he never showed up on a single Hart ballot
2021-22 Bruins, Hurricanes and Blues
Record: All three teams finished in the top ten, with the Hurricanes leading the way at 116 points, the Blues getting to 109 and the Bruins having 107
Playoffs: The Hurricanes beat the Bruins in round one in another no-Hart matchup. Then they went out in the second round, as did the Blues
Why’d they get shut out? A relatively low total of 14 players got Hart votes this year. Beyond that, this is apparently another group of teams where the total is more than the sum of the parts
Who got snubbed? Vladimir Tarasenko, Sebastian Aho, Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak all finished with better than a point-per-game. Frederik Andersen finished fourth in Vezina voting, and Patrice Bergeron ran away with the Selke as always, but none of it is enough to get the attention of voters who are focused on the Connor McDavid vs. Auston Matthews debate back when that was a thing
And then it gets weird …
So here comes the twist I promised you. Remember that starting assumption I made about how the Hurricanes managing to win the Stanley Cup without earning a single Hart vote must be rare if not unheard of? Yeah, about that …
You see, it was. Of the first 17 teams in the cap era to win a Cup, all of them had at least one Hart candidate, if not more. In fact, there were only two teams from modern NHL history I could find who won a Cup without a Hart vote: The 1993 Canadiens, who weren’t all that good and needed an historic overtime heater to win, and the 1995 Devils, from the first lockout-shortened season and nobody knew what was going on
And those were years with far fewer voters — just 50 back in 1993, and only 15 in 1995. These days, with 200? Forget it
Except that it turns out that there’s a very recent pattern of Cup winners getting entirely blanked by Hart voters. It happened to the 2023 Golden Knights. It happened to the 2025 Panthers. And it happened to this year’s Hurricanes
In other words, something that’s only happened twice in decades of modern NHL history suddenly happened three out of four years, even though logic says it should be far rarer
Oh, and the only team in our four-year span that did get a vote? That would be the 2024 Panthers, and they avoid the list thanks to a solitary fifth-place vote for Sam Reinhart, good enough to tie him with Charlie Lindgren. That’s all that’s keeping us from a run of four straight
This means something. I have no idea what
Well, I probably do: Small sample sizes serve up weird results sometimes. But there are other possibilities here. One is that voters have been a bit too quick to dismiss players on good teams, especially ones such as Vegas, Florida and Carolina that are so consistent that we kind of take them for granted
Or maybe the causality flows the other way, and the parity era has shifted into a new phase where the best way to build a winner is to acquire as much star power as possible without tilting your balance too far toward the truly elite. (Can you win the Cup when Aho is your best player? Trick question, it turns out you can’t win a Cup if he’s not.)
Either way, I think there’s one clear lesson we can take away here: Next spring, when the regular season is wrapping up, and writers are musing about the awards ballot, maybe don’t try to bully them into voting for your favorite team’s players. In fact, beg them not to. These days, teams still need a ton of heart to win a Cup. But it also apparently helps to have no Hart at all
(Now, are the Hurricanes the best team in history to not get a single vote for the Hart, Norris or Vezina? Stay tuned for the next time I’m bored to find out.)
