The winner of the Hart Trophy will be announced Thursday.<\/p>\n
Nikita Kucherov<\/a> of the Tampa Bay Lightning, Nathan MacKinnon<\/a>\u00a0of the Colorado Avalanche and Connor McDavid<\/a>\u00a0of the Edmonton Oilers are the finalists for the Hart, which is given annually to the NHL player voted most valuable to his team by the Professional Hockey Writers Association.<\/p>\n The winner will be announced on\u00a0ESPN2 in the United States and\u00a0Sportsnet in Canada during pregame coverage for Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final between the Vegas Golden Knights and Carolina Hurricanes.<\/p>\n The game is scheduled to start at 8 p.m. ET. The best-of-7 series is tied 2-2.<\/p>\n Kucherov was second in the NHL with 130 points (44 goals, 86 assists) in 76 games for the Lightning this season. He led the League with a points-per-game average of 1.71 and had a plus-43 rating, tied for third among all players, and had at least one point in 60 of 76 games, including 40 games with at least two points. The 32-year-old right wing had nine games with at least four points and two five-point games.\u00a0Kucherov’s best stretch came from Dec. 20-Jan. 12, when he had 25 points (10 goals, 15 assists) in 10 games.<\/p>\n Kucherov led the Lightning in goals, assists and points, and he helped them finish second in the Atlantic Division with a 50-26-5 record. A finalist for the third straight season, Kucherov finished third last season and was runner-up in 2023-24. He won the award in 2018-19.<\/p>\n Kucherov was also a finalist for the Ted Lindsay Award, given to the most outstanding player in the NHL as voted by fellow members of the NHL Players’ Association; McDavid was announced as the winner of the Lindsay Award on Sunday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The winner of the Hart Trophy will be announced Thursday. Nikita Kucherov of the Tampa Bay Lightning, Nathan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":698301,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-699649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=699649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/698301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=699649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=699649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=699649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}