Pals, the 2025-26 National Hockey League season was my eighth as a member of the Professional Hockey Writers Association. For the fifth consecutive year, I had the privilege of voting for the year-end NHL awards.

As I’ve been doing every year since receiving a ballot, and in keeping with our organization’s commitment to transparency in our voting, here’s how I voted and my thought process behind each decision I made.

This is one of the toughest awards to vote on each year, but Dahlin’s year – playing at an extremely high level while his wife went through some really scary health challenges – really resonated with me. I also respected the heck out of how Landeskog battled back from a really significant injury to play at a high level, and how Ullmark navigated a really challenging season.

Presented annually “to the forward who best excels in the defensive aspects of the game.”

For this award, I rely upon Dobber’s Player Usage Charts and Natural Stat Trick’s possession metrics. My question is usually: who played the most against top opposition, got the least help from offensive zone starts, and managed to have good underlying numbers despite all of that? Suzuki was my answer. If a forward doesn’t face first-line opposition, it’s tough for me to have them high on my list.

I wrestled between O’Reilly and Mikael Backlund for the fifth spot, ultimately going with O’Reilly.

Who plays a lot, against good players, manages to score a good amount and not take a ton of penalties? I’m of the mindset that it’s tougher to play defence these days than any other position, so I skewed towards Sanderson for the top spot.

Presented annually “to the player selected as the most proficient in his first year of competition.”

This one was not close. Schaefer was flat-out great this season as a freshman. The top three were really clear-cut for me, and I wrestled with the final two spots before landing where I did.

Presented annually “to the defence player who demonstrates throughout the season the greatest all-round ability in the position.”

Let me repeat the definition: “all-around ability in the position.” I don’t think it’s possible to leave the leading scorer among blueliners (Bouchard) off the ballot. But Werenski did the best job balancing the many things a defender has to do well. This was probably the toughest vote to cast, as there was probably seven or eight guys with credible cases – players that combined offensive prowess with defensive acumen. Bouchard’s offensive performance more or less demanding a spot on the ballot bumped Quinn Hughes and Rasmus Dahlin off.

Presented annually “to the player adjudged to be the most valuable to his team.”

There’s a method to my madness here. MacKinnon tops my list because he excelled at even strength production. Kucherov was a handful of points behind MacKinnon at even strength, and he actually led the league’s top grouping in points-per-game. At that point, it’s hard to justify having McDavid much lower, as he led the league in points and was fantastic on the power play. I value even strength scoring higher than special teams scoring, but at worst he’s third. I rounded out my ballot with Celebrini – whose even strength scoring matched McDavid’s – and Suzuki, who was the heart-and-soul of a strong Montreal team.

My All-Rookie ballot was the five players from my Calder ballot, plus Yan Kuznetsov slotted in as the second defender. Why Kuznetsov? He was one of the better penalty-killing defenders in the NHL this season and was one of two rookie blueliners to average more than 20 minutes a game – the other was Matthew Schaefer.

The Hart Trophy is about being valuable to your team, so you have to factor in a few extra things. The All-Star Teams are flat-out about who was the best, which makes the voting feel a bit more straight-forward.