Suzuki, a first-time finalist, finished the 2025-26 season with 29 goals and 101 points \u2014 a career-high \u2014 while also taking nearly a third of Montreal’s faceoffs, ending his regular season with a 50.4 per cent success rate. He led all Canadiens forwards in ice time and was utilized on both the PK and defending at 6 on 5.<\/p>\n
This is Cirelli’s second consecutive finalist nod after losing out on the award last year to Aleksander Barkov and Sam Reinhart. The 28-year-old is part of a Lightning penalty-killing squad that ranked third in the NHL, leading Tampa Bay forwards in shorthanded ice time. He finished the season with 23 goals and 52 points in 71 games.<\/p>\n
Nelson, 34, is a first-time NHL award finalist and the first Avalanche member to be recognized for the award since Joe Sakic in 2001. He finished the season with 33 goals \u2014\u00a0his fourth 30-plus goal season \u2014\u00a0and 65 points while playing a key role in the Avalanche’s league-leading penalty-killing unit, which operated at 84.6 per cent. <\/p>\n
The winner is selected through a vote by the Professional Hockey Writers Association at the end of the regular season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Suzuki, a first-time finalist, finished the 2025-26 season with 29 goals and 101 points \u2014 a career-high \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":462135,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-652146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/462135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}