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Streit A Longshot For The Norris
by Paul on 03/17/09 at 10:48 AM ET
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from Islanders Point Blank,
Mike Green. Nicklas Lidstrom. Dan Boyle. If Streit is in that conversation, it’s quite an honor. Put it this way: if the Islanders were one of the top teams in the league, and the Rangers, Flyers, Wild or any other team were in 30th but had a defenseman tied for third in scoring, would you think their player deserved one of three Norris nominations?
Streit has 12 more games to stake his claim. To have any chance, he’ll need to rack up some points to get past the 60 mark and separate himself from the pack after the unreachable Mike Green.
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Completely, utterly ridiculous. Here’s a little Norris Trophy history primer for Mr. Botta…
Number of times awarded: 54
Number of times awarded to player from last place team: 0
Number of times awarded to player from non-playoff team: 0
Number of times awarded to player from team with losing record: 3
Out of those three, one was to Doug Harvey back in 1962, the first season after he was traded to the Rangers for his efforts in organizing the players. At the time, he was widely acknowledged as the best defenseman in the game (this was his 7th Norris in 8 seasons), and being traded to the fifth place Rangers didn’t change that. Harvey helped them improve by ten points (64 in 70 games) and make it into the playoffs.
The other two times were in back to back years, ‘81 and ‘82. I’ll admit to being a little nonplussed by this. Perhaps post-Orr, the voters were a bit concerned that the Norris was still being too exclusive, having gone only to Potvin and Robinson in the interim. There may also have been some backlash against their dynastic franchises. Carlyle and Wilson both had strong seasons, and were First Team All Stars. But I’m not so sure they were the obvious choices—neither was the top scoring blueliner in their Norris year, to use a stat Mr. Botta seems fond of. Neither were the Pens and Hawks noteworthy teams, both finishing 15th overall in the 21 team league (with 73 and 72 points respectively, in an 80 game season).
To sum up, historically the Norris has gone to a winning player on a winning team. In the 25 years since Wilson’s win, it has gone to a player from a team not in the top ten in league standings just twice (Blake’s Kings were 11th, MacInnis’s Blues 12th). Over that same span, it’s gone to a player from a top five team seventeen times. To even imagine that a player from a 30th place team has a shot is folly, to publicly blog about it is flat out crazy.
The Norris goes to a dominant player. Dominant players don’t play for 30th place teams—they turn 30th place teams into 26th place teams. Botta may say that Streit is doing a fantastic job on a sad-sack team, and that is probably true. But I would ask, who gives their best game against the Islanders? How many backup goalies has he played against this year?
Posted by shep on 03/17/09 at 06:37 PM ET