The 2021-22 NHL regular season is officially in the books after the Winnipeg Jets won 4-3 over the Seattle Kraken on Sunday afternoon.
We’ll have to wait a few weeks to see who wins the majority of NHL awards from the Stanley Cup to MVP for the 2021-22 season, but we know at least a handful of individual and team awards that have already been received. Saved. These include individual awards such as the Art Ross Trophy and the Rocket Richard Award, and team awards such as the President’s Trophy and the William Jennings Trophy.
Florida Panthers forward Jonathan Huberdu gave McDavid a strong run here, but in the end McDevid won the fourth Art Ross Trophy of his career and the second in a row. McDavid finished the season with 44 goals and 123 points, setting new career highs in both categories. He is the only player to have won the award for two years in a row since Jaromir Jagar did so in the late 90’s, and McDavid has won the award on two different occasions. He joins a surprisingly short list of four-time scoring champions, including only him, Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemix, Jagar, Stan Mikita, Gordy Howe and Phil Esposito.
Along with Sidney Crosby, Nikita Kucherov, Joe Thornton and Jagger, who reached the 120-point mark in the same season, is the seventh-highest player after 2000 at 123 points. .
Mathews has now won the second Rocket Richard Award in a row and is crowned the best current goal scorer in the NHL. He set a Maple Leaf franchise record for goals in a single season and became the first player in more than a decade to score 60 goals in a single season. He is just 24 years old and has just completed his sixth season in the NHL but has 259 goals in just 407 regular season games. That’s an average of 52-goal speed per 82 games. The only thing that prevented him from reaching the 50-goal mark before this season was the season and the injury.
The Carolina Hurricanes gambled a bit this season, completely correcting a very productive goalkeeper situation a year ago. He replaced Alex Nedelkzovic and Petr Mrajak in the offseason, replacing them with Frederick Anderson and Aunt Ranta. Both goalkeepers have been great startups throughout their careers but have been sidelined by injuries in recent seasons. Gambling means whether or not they can be healthy and play at their previous level all season. Most likely, they did. Anderson and Ranta allowed the Hurricanes to score just 202 goals this season, the lowest score in the league. Together they saved .916 percent for the season.
Anderson finished 52 matches with a 35-14-3 record and .922 save percentage, while Ranta finished his 28 matches 15-5-4 with a .912 saving percentage. Given the overall strength and defense of Carolina’s forwards, her goalkeeping game was going to be a big X-factor for how the season went or how it went. The goalkeeper excelled, the Hurricanes were the best defensive team in the league and eventually won the Metropolitan Division. The only concern is that both Anderson and Ranta have been facing some injuries over the past few weeks as the Stanley Cup playoffs begin.
The Colorado Avalanche seemed to be on track to win the President’s Trophy with the league’s best record, but then the Florida Panthers won 13 games to help them to the top of the league. This is the first time in the franchise’s history that the Panthers have finished with the league’s best record, and it came at a time when the league was one of the best offenses the league has seen in decades. It is the first team since the 1995-96 Pittsburgh Penguins to score more than four goals per game on average throughout the season.
Now they want to do something they didn’t do in the same 1995-96 season: to win the playoffs. The Panthers are going to be a favorite at the Eastern Conference because of their offense and the way they have played. It remains to be seen whether they will be able to keep up with the same run rate in the playoffs – or the same type of run rate – given the struggles in Sergei Bobrowski’s career playoffs and the way he and Spencer Knight have performed. In the second half of the season.
