Not One Vote for Hart Trophy on a Carolina Championship Roster

The Athletic ran a slow-summer piece this week and buried in it is the best fact I've read about our team all year.

The Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup without a single player receiving one Hart Trophy vote.

Not a finalist. Not a top-five finish. One vote. They got zero.

You have to understand how low that bar actually is. There are close to 200 ballots, and every voter lists five players. That's something like a thousand slots. A Hurricane needed to appear in exactly one of them and it didn't happen.

For scale, guys who have picked up a stray Hart vote in the cap era include Pascal Dupuis, Radim Vrbata, Cam Atkinson and Marek Svatos. Among goalies, Andrew Hammond has one. James Reimer has one. Somebody, somewhere, put those names on a ballot. Nobody put down Aho, or Slavin, or Ehlers, or Bussi, or anyone else who lifted the Cup in June.

The same piece makes the case that this might also be the best team in league history without a Hall of Famer, and when he polled his readers about the Carolina candidates, most of them landed on the Canes probably not having anybody who gets in.

I know how that's supposed to land. Nobody good enough. Nobody special. Won it without a real star.

I think it's the highest compliment this team has ever gotten.

Because look at how the roster is actually built. Our most expensive player is Aho at 9.75 million. That's it. That's the top. Carolina won a championship without a single player making ten million dollars, in a summer where Celebrini just signed for 18.8 and Leo Carlsson got 18.

What we have instead is a band. Ehlers at 8.5. Svechnikov at 7.75. Miller at 7.5. Jarvis at 7.42. Slavin at 6.4. Stankoven at 6. Blake at 5.1. Eight guys stacked between five and ten million and nobody towering over anybody.

That is a deliberate choice, and the whole point of it is that no single player has to be the best in the world on a given night for the thing to function.

And we got to watch that get stress tested last year in about the worst way possible.

Lost Jarvis for 8 games last year, who led the team with 32 goals. Got an .874 save percentage out of the starting goalie through the regular season. Then in the Final, that goalie got pulled in Game 3 and a guy Carolina claimed off waivers finished the series and won the Cup.

A star team does not survive that. If your whole thing is one guy at 18 million a year and he goes down or goes cold, you go home. Carolina lost its leading scorer and its starting goalie and won anyway, because the answer was never one player.

That's the actual definition of a system, and there's now a number attached to it. A thousand ballot slots and none of them had a Hurricane on it, and we won the whole thing.

Do I want a Hall of Famer? Sure. I'd love for Slavin to finally get his due and I'll be arguing about Rod until they put him in.

But I've watched a lot of teams with the best player on the ice go home in May. We didn't have him. We had the guys who could beat you and a room that didn't need permission from anybody.

Zero Hart votes and a banner. I'll take that trade every time.

Go Canes.