Connor McDavid has 47 points through his first 18 games of the 2026-27 season, and somehow nearly 12 percent of the Professional Hockey Writers Association voters polled by ESPN this week looked at that sheet and handed their first-place Hart Trophy ballot to somebody else.
Stop and read that scoring pace again. Averaging 2.61 points per game puts the Edmonton Oilers captain on the sixth-highest single-season clip in NHL history, trailing only three Wayne Gretzky campaigns and two Mario Lemieux seasons. Bookmakers currently price the entire NHL field at plus money against McDavid alone, while one voter in the ESPN survey responded with a single word: “Duh.” Yet when the anonymous November ballots came back, McDavid cleared just over 88 percent of the first-place vote while Nathan MacKinnon and Kirill Kaprizov both picked up first-place support.
I consider every single one of those dissenting first-place ballots an act of basketball-style voter fatigue creeping into hockey, and an affront to historical greatness. When a player is chasing a fourth career Hart Trophy that would put him in a room occupied only by Gretzky, Gordie Howe, and Eddie Shore, withholding a unanimous mandate because you want a cute November narrative is malpractice.
The Minnesota Five-On-Five Fortress Cannot Erase A 16-Point Chasm
To convict the dissenters fairly, we have to examine their star witness in St. Paul. One voter who actually cast a ballot for McDavid still offered a pointed warning in the ESPN poll: “I wouldn’t bet against Kirill Kaprizov narrowing the gap as the season goes along.” The pro-Kaprizov case rests on Minnesota’s five-on-five dominance.
Look at the mechanism behind Minnesota’s surge, and you understand why voters are tempted. Skating alongside Joel Eriksson Ek and Matt Boldy, Kaprizov has posted 31 points and 16 goals in 19 games while that trio has generated nearly five goals per 60 minutes at five-on-five without surrendering a single even-strength goal against.
That zero in the five-on-five goals-against column through 19 games is a tactical masterpiece, and I respect the structural perfection of that line. It still falls 16 points short of what McDavid has already banked in one fewer game. Even the editors at theScore noted in their early awards breakdown that while Kaprizov leads the charge in goal-scoring, he faces a steep climb as a winger with less two-way responsibility than an elite pivot. You do not penalize a center producing at a Lemieux-level clip just because a winger in Minnesota is playing on a line with a spotless even-strength differential.
Voter Fatigue Is Robbing Hockey Of A Historic Mandate
Then there is the Colorado contingent. MacKinnon, the 2024 Hart winner and a five-time finalist, earned first-place support in the ESPN poll by dragging a sluggish Avalanche roster to 30 points through 18 games, sitting seven points clear of his nearest teammate. The appeal of MacKinnon is easy to see: a superstar keeping a slow-starting contender afloat.
I refuse to grade the most prestigious individual trophy in the sport on a sympathy curve. McDavid hasn’t won the Hart since 2023, a bizarre three-year drought for the best player breathing, and voters have grown so numb to his excellence that they treat 47 points in 18 nights like background noise. Earlier in the campaign, when McDavid had 34 points through 12 games, he was already 10 points clear of Leon Draisaitl for the league lead, while Evan Bouchard has ridden that Edmonton offensive wave to over 83 percent of the first-place vote in the Norris Trophy race.
Punishing McDavid because Bouchard and Draisaitl also feast on his zone entries and power-play orchestration flips the entire definition of value upside down. McDavid is the engine that turned Edmonton into a top-five team out of the gate. Another voter in the ESPN poll stated the reality plainly: “He’s the clear front-runner and it’s not close.”
What happens over the next six weeks of the expanded 84-game schedule will determine whether the PHWA corrects this early embarrassment or doubles down on contrarian stubbornness. If McDavid carries this 2.61 points-per-game pace into January and still sees voters hunting for excuses to split the ballot, the story won’t be about whether he catches Gretzky and Lemieux in the record books… it will be about the writers who refused to admit what was happening right in front of them.
