Defencemen Deserve More NHL Awards - The Issue With One Trophy

Although the NHL offers a wide variety of individual trophies awarded to players for accomplishing various feats, the voting for these trophies are often biased towards forwards. A defenceman can theoretically win the Hart trophy for most valuable player, but what are the odds when Chris Pronger’s win in 1999-2000 was the only occurrence since 1972? Even goaltenders have had much more success in winning the MVP award compared to defencemen. Similarly, objective trophies, such as the Art Ross and Rocket Richard trophies for most points and goals respectively, are also theoretically available for defencemen to win. However, due to the nature and duties of the position, the chances are extremely unlikely. As a result, the Norris trophy for the NHL’s best defenceman is the only trophy that is exclusive for defencemen. For a position that employs approximately half as many players as the forward positions, there is a disproportionally low amount of trophies won by defencemen.

Breakdown of each major individual NHL award won by players.

Before coming up with solutions for this issue, it would first be helpful to highlight what the Norris trophy is. By definition, the Norris trophy is awarded to the top defencemen for all aspects of the position. It is important to note that as the game has evolved, so have the roles of defencemen. While the name implies that they should focus on protecting their zone and supporting the goaltender in keeping the puck out of the net, the duties of defencemen have expanded to include defensive zone breakout plays, quarter backing a powerplay, shooting the puck from the blue line in a way that allows for easier deflections from forwards, joining odd-man rushes, etc. Because of the complexity of the position, it would make sense to have more trophies categorized by a specific skillset that various defencemen portray more than others. Currently, there is a heavy bias towards points in the voting system, which is just one of multiple defensive duties.

List of Norris Trophy winners since after the 2013 lockout shortened season.

As seen, no defenceman who has won the Norris trophy had below 60 points in a full season excluding Drew Doughty in 2015-2016, who still posted an impressive 51 points. In fact, Rod Langway in 1983-1984 is the last Norris winner to have below 50 points. This doesn’t mean that these defencemen putting up lots of points aren’t also elite in defensive categories as well. In fact, based on winners from the above chart, I think the Norris trophy was rewarded to the correct defenceman every year based on its definition of a well rounded defenceman. However, it undoubtedly seems that there is a threshold for a certain amount of points required to achieve votes, regardless of the type of style the defenceman plays. This punishes defencemen well known for their defensive side of the game. Some examples include Jacob Slavin of the Carolina Hurricanes, Gustav Forsling of the Florida Panthers, and Devon Toews of the Colorado Avalanche. These defencemen are widely regarded as some of the best “defensive defencemen” in the National Hockey League. Despite the fact that they also put up a respectable number of points, making them well rounded defencemen, they seem to be disregarded from Norris consideration for not hitting that 60+ point threshold.

I believe the solution to this minor issue of the Norris trophy, as well as the more blatant issue of few trophies awarded to defencemen, is to create more trophies specifically for defencemen. The first and most important gap to address, as mentioned previously, would be the category of defencemen who are reliable defensively, but are not expected to put up a lot of goals and points. This would be a trophy that considers stat categories such as blocked shots, hits, takeaway to giveaway ratio, penalty kill minutes, plus/minus, etc, while also observing qualitative characteristics such as board battle abilities and stick checking.

The next trophy could address the offensive defencemen specifically. This could be a trophy that disregards giveaways and turnovers, common among truly offensive defencemen that punish their chances to win the Norris. Instead, this trophy could focus on the offensive stats like goals and points, as well as powerplay time, defensive zone exits, etc. A perfect example of a defencemen that could fall into this category is Evan Bouchard of the Edmonton Oilers. Bouchard plays a vital role on their historically good powerplay, and finished fourth in points among defencemen in the 2023-2024 regular season. However, he simultaneously led the league in giveaways. Evan Bouchard finished fifth in Norris trophy voting, ahead of aforementioned Gustav Forsling, who is objectively better at playing defence. This new trophy could help relieve the points bias seen in the Norris trophy voting.

Despite the addition of two new trophies splitting the categories up into offesnive and defensive defencemen, the Norris trophy would be here to stay. With the introduction of the two new trophies, the Norris trophy can now set its focus to what truly matters; that being all around defence. This doesn’t mean a player couldn’t still win multiple of the defencemen exclusive trophies, however, the updated Norris trophy would be able to better filter out players who are clearly not as well rounded as others. Ryan Lindgren, a fantastic defensive defensemen worthy of a “best defensive defencemen” award would simply have too few offensive perks to his game to be considered for the Norris trophy. Evan Bouchard would be capable of winning the “best offensive defencemen” award, but has too many holes in his defensive game to be considered for the Norris trophy. This way, truly well rounded defencemen are the only ones considered and receiving votes for the Norris trophy. It is important to point out that the current defencemen regarded as among the best in the league already fit this description of the Norris trophy. I don’t necessarily think the Norris trophy itself has had any issues with its structure, debatably outside of 2022-2023 Erik Karlsson with the most egregious bias towards offensive attributes. However, this new system would allow for more allocation of votes away from the hyper offensive or defensive defencemen and instead towards well rounded defencemen.

Overall, the current Norris trophy hasn’t had many issues. After many years of NHL awards, it seems like the Norris trophy more than any other trophy holds the most widely agreed upon winners each year. However, it doesn’t make sense as to why there are not more awards for defencemen to win. When you have defencemen as reliable in their own zone as the likes of Jacob Slavin and Gustav Forsling who are essentially written off from the Norris trophy due to their modest number of points, there is an apparent issue. Not only would introducing more awards for defencemen slightly enhance the Norris trophy itself, but it would also bring more respect to an extremely important position on the ice.