How I voted for the 2016 NHL Awards, and why I voted that way

Members of the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association have the opportunity to vote for five major National Hockey League awards each year. For the second time in my career, I was one of those members this year.

There’s ongoing debate among the PHWA membership about whether we should be required to disclose our ballots publicly, like they do in other sports. I’m pretty firmly in the camp that thinks disclosure is a good thing, and thus as I did last year, I’m gonna talk about my ballot.

I won’t bury the lede here. I tweeted out my ballot award-by-award as they were handed out on Wednesday night, and I immediately heard a lot of backlash for my decision to vote for Patrick Kane as the NHL player most valuable to his team.

Voting for Kane was not an easy decision at all. On one hand, he was clearly and unequivocally the best player in the NHL in 2015-16 by any fair on-ice metric. We’re asked to pick the best hockey player. Kane was the best hockey player. That part is easy.

But the cloud followed him all season long — even after Erie County, N.Y., officials closed the sexual assault investigation involving him in November — is not something that should be treated flippantly, nor should it be ignored. The allegations against him were extremely serious, and the NHL did not do a good job in handling this incident from the minute it became public in August to the day they called the allegations “unfounded” in a March press release.

I don’t even think Patrick Kane should have been on the ice for the first month of the NHL season as that investigation carried on, and I think the NHL and the Chicago Blackhawks were wrong to have allowed him to play during that time. You could make a case that the NHL should have kept him off the ice until March when their own investigation into the incident closed.

I don’t believe the allegations against Kane were taken all that seriously by the NHL or the Blackhawks, and I think that they handled the situation nearly as badly as they possibly could have. I think they disrespected the concerns of many women who are their fans, and by letting him play during that investigation, I think they helped fuel a culture in which rape victims are afraid to come forward in cases against star athletes. At the very least, they certainly fueled the fire in terms of making us all feel terrible about their game: both among fans who had to watch him play despite their strong negative feelings towards him, and among those of us whose job it is to cover him objectively.

With all of that said, I can only cover Kane based on what I know, and there’s nothing black and white about this case. We’re nine months out from when these allegations against him first came out and there are still significant questions here. There are a lot of people who are absolutely 100 percent convinced of his guilt, and that’s an opinion that we should all respect. A hockey fan is allowed to look at the information provided to them and make their own decision on a player’s conduct and his character. They can put this in black and white terms if that is their belief or desire.

As a journalist, however, I can’t do that. Not professionally at least. I can’t call Patrick Kane a rapist unless I can prove that he’s a rapist. I have to base my professional judgment on the facts that we can prove. Right from the mouth of the Erie County District Attorney, here is all that we can safely prove:

The totality of the credible evidence -- the proof -- does not sufficiently substantiate the complainant’s allegation that she was raped by Patrick Kane and this so-called “case” is rife with reasonable doubt. Accordingly, the Office of the Erie County District Attorney will not present this matter to an Erie County Grand Jury.

I understand that there are many reasons why a rape case gets dismissed, and that many of those reasons have nothing to do with the guilt or innocence of the accused. And given those reasons, I understand why many people believe Kane is guilty.

I, too, have my personal opinions about Patrick Kane and his conduct off the ice. But when acting in my capacity as a journalist, I don’t have the freedom to call him a rapist — regardless of what I believe. There are laws against it.

That same judgment has to carry over to how I cover him, Hart Trophy voting included. By placing Kane elsewhere on my ballot, or by removing him from it completely, I’m basically saying that I believe he’s guilty of rape. There would be no other reason for me to leave him off my ballot other than because I am convinced of his guilt.

I wish this entire case wasn’t as ridiculously murky as it has been from start to finish, but that’s the unfortunate reality. Kane is a very talented hockey player with an extremely questionable off-ice history, and I don’t know if we’ll ever get real clarity beyond that.

Many people point to the fact that the Norris says we must pick the defenseman with the “best all-around ability.” Since Karlsson is not a player who plays much on the penalty kill, the argument is that Karlsson’s candidacy doesn’t stack up well against Doughty, who plays in all three game states. And people often view Karlsson as an offense-only defenseman who excels on the score sheet because he plays so much time in the offensive zone. But that’s not true. He’s Ottawa’s No. 1 defenseman and he plays so often in the offensive zone because he is one of hockey’s elite possession defensemen.

That’s not to say Doughty is not, but when it comes to driving play, Karlsson is on another level. Consider his inferior teammates, and that’s he’s essentially a one-man show in Ottawa. That separates him from Doughty in my opinion.

I outlined my reasons for voting for Gostisbehere over McDavid or Panarin here back in May.

Ahh, the “best player who is also a very nice boy on the ice” award. I’m pretty sure that nearly everybody just searches Hockey Reference for “fewest penalty minutes per game” and then picks the five dudes who they think are the best players on that list.

I did quite a bit of back and forth in my head before popping Barkov at the top of my ballot, but ultimately, the fact that he can be in the same conversation with Kopitar as a two-way center despite being eight years younger is extremely impressive to me. At age 20, he’s the most important forward in all situations on one of the best teams in the Eastern Conference.

It’s hard to read too much into this ballot, though. There are so many damn players who could be nominated for this award. I kinda wish they’d nail down the meaning of it a little bit more and make things a little more clear, because right now this award still feels pretty vague and kind of useless.

Selke is always a hard one, and this year was no different. It seems like Kopitar and Bergeron are in this conversation every year, and in all honesty there’s not much separating the two in my opinion. Both play in the toughest situations the opposing team has to throw at them and they are clearly the top two defensive forwards in the NHL. In picking one of them, I almost felt as though I was flipping a coin — but ultimately went with Kopitar due to his slight edge in Corsi percentage and his superior point total. (After all, scoring is part of a good defense too, right?)

As for adding Couturier on my ballot, his stats jumped out at me as just ever so slightly behind the top two guys, and he would have been closer had he played more of the season. Datsyuk gets a spot on the ballot despite playing in slightly easier situations this year, and in hindsight honestly I do wish I had put Joe Thornton in here.