NHL awards watch at the midway point

Nikita Kucherov is currently the best player on the Tampa Bay Lightning, which also happens to currently be the NHL's best team. He has gone on an absolutely incredible run offensively to climb to the top of the NHL scoring and has been as electrifying and dominant as any other player in the league. This is not a new development. He has been near the top of the NHL for about three years now and can be borderline unstoppable when he gets rolling the way he has been throughout the first half of the 2018-19 NHL season. He will almost certainly have to hold off Connor McDavid for the scoring title (he was not able to do that a year ago), but even if he does not end the season as the NHL's leading scorer he is going to be somewhere near the top of the list. That will almost certainly make him a finalist for the award, given how great the Lightning have been from the start. 

The Colorado Avalanche could probably have three Hart Trophy candidates, and all of them play on the team's top line. That is going to be the problem for MVP voters, as they try to differentiate the contributions among Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen and Gabriel Landeskog. They all work together perfectly as a trio and all do their own share of the heavy lifting for a team that has almost nothing after those three. I think my preference might be to lean toward MacKinnon since he is the center on that group, scores more goals and does more to generate shots. Really, though, you cannot go wrong with any of them. 

Johnny Gaudreau is the argument for why teams shouldn't get hung up on a player's height or weight. Find the players who are talented and can put the puck in the net. He might be one of the smallest players in the league, but he is also one of the most productive, most exciting and best players in the world. He is the engine that drives the Flames and is on track for a monster season. With Calgary rocketing toward the top of the NHL standings, that is going to make him an MVP contender. 

I thought Alex Ovechkin deserved more consideration for the MVP a year ago, given how good he was for a team that was, once again, a Stanley Cup contender. He is even better this season for a team that is again a Stanley Cup contender and literally just won the Stanley Cup. He has already won the MVP award three different times, and a fourth would put him in some pretty exclusive company. Only Wayne Gretzky, Gordie Howe and Eddie Shore have won it four times. 

This is going to be annoying again: the argument that is going to be centered around the MVP debate as it relates to what it means and value. There is no player in the NHL who does more for his team than what Connor McDavid does for the Edmonton Oilers. He contributes to more than half of their goals, he is the only thing that keeps them from being the unquestioned worst team in the league, and it is not his fault the front office has assembled such a bad team around him. If the Oilers miss the playoffs, he will probably have no chance to win the award (again) even though he truly is the league's most valuable player. Value is value no matter what happens around the player. 

Mark Giordano is one of the NHL's great success stories, going from an undrafted free agent and developing into one of the best all-around defenders in the league. He has been one of the most underrated players for several years now and is finally getting some recognition for his play now that he is the centerpiece of the Calgary Flames' turnaround. The Flames are one of the best teams in the league through the first half of the 2018-19 season, and Giordano has been one of the biggest factors in that development. He might be the front-runner for the Norris Trophy at the halfway point. 

Kris Letang's 2017-18 season was probably one of the worst of his NHL career. He was coming back from another significant injury that had made him miss half of the 2016-17 season as well as the entire postseason (when the Pittsburgh Penguins won a second consecutive Stanley Cup), and he was never really 100 percent last year. He has come back in 2018-19 with what might be at this point the best season of his NHL career. He has been a constant workhorse for the Penguins all season and has dominated all three zones and all situations. There is a strong argument to be made that he has been their best overall player this season, even ahead of captain Sidney Crosby (who also has been remarkable for them this season). He has been a finalist for the Norris Trophy once before and could find himself there again this season. 

The Toronto Maple Leafs aren't really known for being a great defensive team, but they do have one of the league's best at the position in Morgan Rielly. He is putting up monstrous numbers this season as part of the high-powered attack in Toronto and is at the top of pretty much every major offensive category for defenders. He may not have been selected to the 2019 NHL All-Star Game, but he will probably have to settle for being a finalist for the Norris Trophy (barring injury). He may even win it. 

Seth Jones just missed being a finalist a year ago (he finished in fourth place in the voting), but there seems to be a strong push for him this season. He has become the Columbus Blue Jackets' best defender and one of the best all-around defenders in the league due to his combination of game-breaking offense and shutdown defense. He does absolutely everything and does it as well as anyone else in the league at his position. 

Erik Karlsson took some heat early in the season because his offensive numbers were not up to the same level we had seen in recent years. But he was still controlling play when he was on the ice and playing at a Norris Trophy level. Now the point production is there to match it. He is already a two-time Norris Trophy winner, a two-time runner-up and is going to be in the discussion again this season. He and teammate Brent Burns are both going to make a strong argument for the award and are going to make the Sharks an extremely difficult team to have to face in the playoffs. He is trying to become just the ninth defender in league history to win the Norris Trophy three different times. 

He might even have an argument for the league MVP award. John Gibson has been the single biggest reason the Anaheim Ducks have been even somewhat competitive this season in the face of injuries and a system that has seem them get crushed on the shots and scoring-chance charts from the start of the season. When he is healthy, he is one of the best goaltenders in the league and has been for a few years now. This season might be the best he has ever played in the NHL. 

Pekka Rinne is trying to become the first player since Martin Brodeur to win back-to-back Vezina Trophies. After winning the 2017-18 award with one of the best seasons of his career, Rinne has been just as dominant this season for the Nashville Predators. He had a .920 save percentage through the first half of the season and three shutouts in his first 30 starts. For a while it looked like his career was starting to decline, but he has bounced back in a huge way the past two years. He is a big reason the Predators are once again one of the top Stanley Cup contenders in the NHL. 

Andrei Vasilevskiy was a finalist for the award a year ago and has been just as good this season. The only thing that has held him back has been the fact that he missed a month due to injury while the Tampa Bay Lightning continued to win in his absence. That does not take away from his value, though. It just makes the Lightning that much better when he is in the lineup. 

He is an underrated part of the Toronto Maple Leafs' core. They still have some issues defensively and lean on Frederik Andersen heavily to keep opponents off the board, and if he has shown anything over the past two years, it is that he can take on a huge workload over the course of the regular season and play at a consistently high level. He may not have the high-end potential of a John Gibson or Andrei Vasilevskiy, but he is rarely the reason the Maple Leafs lose. He always gives his team a chance and can play a ton of minutes. 

This is kind of a dark horse pick, but Robin Lehner has been the single biggest factor in the New York Islanders' surprising performance this season. Barry Trotz and the new coaching staff will get most of the attention, but Lehner posting a .927 save percentage through the first half of the season has been the single biggest factor the Islanders have been a potential playoff team this season. 

Right now the Rookie of the Year Award seems to be Elias Pettersson's to lose. There has not been a more impactful rookie anywhere in the NHL, and there really has not been anyone close to him. He has been a one-man highlight reel all season and completely changed the short-term (and perhaps even long-term) trajectory of the Vancouver Canucks rebuild. Even though they have won fewer games than any team in the NHL over the past three full seasons, they still never ended up picking higher than fifth in the draft, and they were fortunate enough to be able to grab an impact talent like Pettersson. 

After years of near misses in the draft lottery, the Buffalo Sabres finally got the ping pong balls to go their way in 2018, resulting in defender Rasmus Dahlin joining the organization. He has been outstanding so far and has shown flashes of superstar potential. He is playing more than 20 minutes per night and has already eclipsed the 20-point mark in half a season. He is on track for one of the best seasons ever by an 18-year-old defender in NHL history. 

It is really tough for defenders to get much attention in the Rookie of the Year race, but this season there are two who should be near the top of the list. Dallas' Miro Heiskanen is one of them. The Stars have been so high on the 2017 No. 3 overall pick that they reportedly refused to make him available in potential trade talks for Erik Karlsson. So far this season, Heiskanen has been playing as a top-pairing defender, logging more than 22 minutes per night and showing plenty of offensive ability. He and John Klingberg should be a dominant duo on defense in Dallas for the next decade. 

When the Ottawa Senators elected to hang on to their 2018 first-round pick (No. 4 overall) and instead send their 2019 pick to the Colorado Avalanche as part of the Matt Duchene trade, it put a ton of pressure on the organization to get it right — especially since that 2019 pick could very well be even higher than the 2018 pick and perhaps even the top pick in the draft (which would be disastrous for Ottawa because of how good Jack Hughes potentially is). So far it looks like they got it right. Brady Tkachuk has been one of the bright spots for the Senators through the first half of the 2018-19 season and has been one of the top rookies in the NHL. He had 10 goals and 10 assists through his first 33 games and made an instant impact in the Senators lineup. 

He's a long shot at this point, but Andrei Svechnikov still looks like he has a chance to be a core player for the Carolina Hurricanes in their rebuild. The No. 2 overall pick in the 2018 NHL draft, Svechnikov is one of the top rookie goal scorers in the league through the first half of the season and is at the top of the list when it comes to shots on goals.

The argument against him will be that he has a ton of talent, and the Coach of the Year Award almost always goes to someone whose team seems to overachieve or is a surprise. That means it's a team that probably missed the playoffs the year before or came out of nowhere to contend. It does not usually go to coaches behind the bench of a Stanley Cup contender. While it is true that Cooper has a ton of talent at his disposal (arguably the deepest, most talented team in the league) that should not exclude him from the discussion for the NHL's Coach of the Year Award. 

The Montreal Canadiens traded two of their best offensive players (Max Pacioretty and Alex Galchenyuk) over the summer, they played most of the first half of their season without their best defender (Shea Weber), and their superstar goalie (Carey Price) has been, for lack of a better word, OK . Yet here are the Canadiens hanging around in the playoff race with a pretty legitimate chance to get in. Claude Julien is a highly regarded coach and will get a ton of credit for his team's ability to compete this season. 

Before this season, Bill Peters had been a head coach for several seasons in the NHL, but he never made the playoffs in any of them. At the halfway point of the 2018-19 NHL season, he is behind the bench for one of the NHL's best teams, the Calgary Flames, and would seem to be one of the front-runners for the award for obvious reasons. Peters' past record with the Carolina Hurricanes was never great, but his teams always played hard and with a purpose. He just seemed to be short on talent. Now the talent is there, and the results are starting to follow. 

He might be more of a long shot at this point because of the way the Sabres have cooled off following their 10-game winning streak in November. But his team has a chance to return to the playoffs for the first time since the 2010-11 season. That is no small accomplishment for a team that has been one of the worst in the NHL for the past five years. Is he the best coach in the NHL? Almost certainly not. But given the team success and where it is coming from, he is definitely going to get consideration. 

He has all of the ingredients to be the Coach of the Year. He leads a team that had no expectations entering the season, he took over a team that has been bad and just lost its best player, and he has exceeded what even the most optimistic fan could have hoped for. Oh, by the way, he is also the reigning Stanley Cup champion coach. If his New York Islanders make the playoffs, he will be the popular consensus among voters and will probably, at the very least, be a finalist.