The Edmonton Oilers have never had a rookie of the year but Ryan Nugent-Hopkins could be the first to have his name on the Calder Trophy.
The NHL announced its Calder Trophy finalists on Friday and not surprisingly, the list of three include Colorado’s Gabriel Landeskog, Edmonton’s Nugent-Hopkins and New Jersey’s Adam Henrique. They finished one, two and three in rookie scoring this season and in scoring ballots from the 148 voters in the Professional Hockey Writers Association.
I’ll get Henrique out of the way right now. I like this kid and I think he’s going to be a good two-way player for a long time, but I just don’t see him being the rookie of the year.
Henrique only finished a point back of Landeskog and Nugent-Hopkins and played 74 games. The 21-year-old also posted the NHL’s longest point streak among freshmen at seven games.
He is a 2008 draftee and to me that weighs heavily in his disfavour because the other two candidates went straight from the draft into the NHL. He led all rookies in assists (35) and shorthanded goals (four).
It may also work against Henrique that he spent much of the year in the middle of Zach Parise and Ilya Kovalchuk. None of the other rookie finalists had anywhere near that kind of advantage and it still didn’t lead to an overwhelmingly difference in his points total.
That leaves us with No. 1 and No. 2 from the 2011 NHL Entry Draft. Nugent-Hopkins and Landeskog were equal in points but so different in play. These two youngsters are polar opposites in the way they — and their games — are built.
Landeskog, a strapping physical specimen, bruising winger who plays an all-around game that suggests he’s a teenager only on his birth certificate. Then there’s Nugent-Hopkins, who looks like he might blow away in a strong wind but has surprising strength, a sweet set of hands and the smarts to go with it. This is like comparing, as the old saying goes, apples to oranges.
It’s tough to make a case against Landeskog. He scored the second most rookie goals at 22. The winger was the only rookie to lead his club in goals. It’s no surprise he had that many goals whne you consider that he took 270 shots. No need for the crowd to yell "Shoot!" when Landeskog has the puck. He finished 15th in the NHL for shots on goal; Evgeni Malkin had 339 as the league leader.
Speaking of leading, that’s what Landeskog did with a Colorado team that almost made the playoffs and who made a 20-point jump in the standings. Landeskog would be my rookie of the year if there was no such thing as Nugent-Hopkins.
RNH wasn’t even supposed to be in the NHL or at least that was the belief going into training camp. He proved that wasn’t the case on opening night when he scored his first NHL goal.
Then in game three of his career, he had a hat trick and finally RNH became the first 18-year-old in NHL history to tally five assists in one game against Chicago on Nov. 19. Nugent-Hopkins went on to finish in a tie for first place among rookies in points with 52, despite missing 20 games due to injury. His point-per-game average was .84, Landeskog’s was .63.
To give this some perspective, let’s say RNH played a full season like Landeskog did. Using his average points per game, Nugent-Hopkins would have put up 69 points. If you go the opposite way and take Landeskog’s points per game average and multiply it by the amount of games RNH played (62) his total this season would have been 39 points. In either scenario, I’m not writing this blog and we’re not having any conversation about the rookie of the year. It would be Nugent-Hopkins in a landslide.
The thing it will come down is the 20 games RNH missed. On Jan. 2, Nugent-Hopkins fell into the boards against Chicago and was out 12 games. After returning for two games, he took a hit from Toronto’s Mike Brown on Feb. 6 and missed eight more. How the voters look at that stretch will determine who ends up with a trophy that was originally bought and paid for by then NHL president Frank Calder.
The votes are in and the league has hired an accounting firm to tally them up. So now we play the waiting game to see who the 2011-12 Calder Trophy winner will be. The NHL awards will happen June 20th in Las Vegas and I bet you the winner will be Nugent-Hopkins.