NHL Stat Pack: Is Any Player as Hart-Worthy as Connor McDavid?

On the surface, this year's Hart Trophy race looks like a slam dunk for Connor McDavid.

With 15 games remaining in the Edmonton Oilers' 2022-23 regular season, the 26-year-old captain leads the NHL in goals (55), assists (72) and points (127). He has 29 more points than second-place Leon Draisaitl (98 points), his teammate, and is tied with Draisaitl, Colorado's Mikko Rantanen and Tampa Bay's Brayden Point for the most game-winning goals this season (nine). 

In his first seven seasons, McDavid won the Art Ross Trophy for most points in a season four times. He's not just on track for a fifth, but he has already beaten his previous personal bests in goals and points with a month of games still to be played. He needs eight more assists for a career high in that category as well.

If McDavid keeps up his current rate of production, he'll hit 67 goals and 88 assists for 155 points by season's end. That would tie him with the biggest offensive year of Steve Yzerman's career, 1988-89, and make him just the fourth player in NHL history to hit that milestone. Wayne Gretzky beat 155 points nine times, and Mario Lemieux did it four times. That's it.

But the Hart Trophy is about more than just the highest-scoring player in any given season. Officially, it's awarded to "the player adjudged to be the most valuable to his team," based on voting by members of the Professional Hockey Writers' Association.

So what makes a player valuable to his team? Certainly, big point totals are helpful. McDavid has that locked up. Game-winning goals are important. He's right there in that category as well.

Some PHWA voters have a hard-and-fast rule that they won't back a player for the Hart unless his team is playoff-bound. You can't be that valuable, the thinking goes, if you can't get your team over that threshold and into the post-season. 

That hurt McDavid's candidacy in the 2017-18 season when he won the Art Ross with 108 points despite the Oilers finishing 17 points out of a playoff spot. He ended up fifth in Hart voting, while Taylor Hall narrowly edged out Nathan MacKinnon for the award.

So team success is a plus. But if a team is too good, with too many stars, it becomes difficult to isolate the MVP impact of one individual.

An argument could be made that McDavid's superlative success this season comes in part from having a better-balanced team around him, including but not limited to 2020 Hart Trophy-winner Leon Draisaitl, as well as his ongoing commitment to growing his game.

And while McDavid leads Draisaitl by 13 goals and 29 points through March 13, a handful of other teams have leading scorers who are even further ahead of any of their teammates.

Here are the five teams with more than 13 goals between their first and second-place players:

And here are the three other teams with margins of 29 points or more between their top two scorers:

What about the share of points contributed by a Hart Trophy candidate? 

The Oilers have recorded a league-leading 258 goals so far this season. McDavid's 55 goals represent 21.3 percent of all Oilers goals, and his 127 points fall just short of half, at 49.2 percent.

By those metrics, only two players are close on the goal side.

In Minnesota, Kirill Kaprizov's 39 goals count for 20.7 percent of all goals scored by the Wild. And even though he's currently injured, Kaprizov has been in on 39.4 percent of all Minnesota scoring plays this season while leading the team with 74 points.

Mikko Rantanen's 43 goals count for 20.5 percent of all goals scored by the Colorado Avalanche this season. And with 78 total points, he's in on 37.1 percent of all of the Avs' scoring plays. It's an impressive number, but it doesn't even put him first on his own team. Nathan MacKinnon leads the way at 38.6 percent.

Here are all the scorers who have logged at least 15 percent of their team's goals this year. 

(*Timo Meier's total counts his 31 goals scored in a San Jose uniform against all Sharks goals scored this season, including after Meier was traded.)

In terms of percentage of points, McDavid's closest challenger is Erik Karlsson. With 84 points, Karlsson has been in on 43.8 percent of all goals scored by the Sharks this season. At 95 points and sitting third in the overall scoring race, 2019 Hart-winner Nikita Kucherov is the only other player in the 40s, at 41.1 percent.

Here are the other team leaders who have factored into at least 35 percent of their team's goals so far this season:

There are four duplicate names from the goal list — Keller, Robertson, Pastrnak and Thompson. Those are the players who can score and set up goals, as McDavid has done this season.

Of course, there's an argument that goalies are actually the most valuable players to their teams: though they don't play every game, they're on the ice all the time when they do suit up, and their actions correlate most directly to wins and losses. 

But the keepers of the crease get two trophies of their own, the Vezina and the Jennings. So it's rare for them to make enough of an impact to play their way into the Hart conversation. 

Since Dominik Hasek's back-to-back wins with the Buffalo Sabres in the heart of the Dead Puck Era in the late ’90s, just two goalies have been awarded the Hart. Both were from the Montreal Canadiens: Jose Theodore in 2002 and Carey Price in 2015.

So after slicing and dicing all these numbers, it's hard to make a case that any skater has done more for his team during this regular season than what McDavid has done for the Oilers this year.

And that's what Hart voting is based upon. In his eighth NHL campaign, No. 97 has the inside track to his third MVP award.

That would move him ahead of Sidney Crosby (2007, 2014) and tie him with five players: Alex Ovechkin, Mario Lemieux, Bobby Orr, Bobby Clarke and Howie Morenz.

Just three players in NHL history have won the Hart more than three times: Wayne Gretzky (nine), Gordie Howe (six) and Eddie Shore (four).