Top 10 Hart Trophy candidates for 2024-25

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It’s a wonderful time to be a hockey fan if you enjoy greatness.

In the past two seasons alone: Connor McDavid became the sixth player to score 150 points in a season; Erik Karlsson became the first defenseman in more than 30 years to tally 100 points in a season; Auston Matthews become the first player since Mario Lemieux in 1995-96 to score 69 goals; and McDavid and Nikita Kucherov became the fourth and fifth players to record 100 assists in a season, joining Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretzky and Lemieux.

With superstardom exploding in the NHL in a manner we haven’t seen since peak 99 and 66, the annual MVP race has become an absolute dogfight. Case in point: despite accomplishing what they did last season, McDavid, Matthews and Kucherov still couldn’t snatch the Hart Trophy. Nathan MacKinnon, who went off for his own 140-point campaign, got the honor.

The 2024-25 Hart race projects to be just as difficult to predict. Who has the inside track? Here are my top 10 candidates, with their bet365 odds included in brackets.

(Note the conspicuous absence of Leon Draisaitl. It’s not a knock on his sublime scoring talent at all; the truth is that Draisaitl never contends for the MVP as long as his teammate McDavid is healthy. Draisaitl won it in 2019-20, when McJesus missed time, but has never finished higher than seventh in any other season. Draisaitl has never been more valuable than a healthy McDavid to this point.)

1. Connor McDavid, Edmonton Oilers (+155)

No need to overthink this one. The century’s greatest hockey talent opens every season as the MVP favorite. In his past eight campaigns, he’s won the Hart three times, finished as a runner-up three times and never finished outside the top five. His goal total halved from 64 to 32 last season with his shooting percentage dipping to 12.2, his lowest since 2016-17, so the expected rebound in goals alone makes him the probable scoring champ. That’s half the Hart battle; 14 of the past 20 MVPs also led the NHL in points.

2. Auston Matthews, Toronto Maple Leafs (+2600)

Matthews at +2600 odds feels like a misprint. While he lacks the points ceiling of the other elite-tier candidates, he’s the best defensive forward of the lot by far, having finished third in the Selke Trophy vote last season. He has also led the NHL in goals in three of the past four seasons, won the Hart in 2021-22 and has finished top-four in the vote in three of the past four seasons. The award is subjective, remember, so Matthews’ 200-foot game will continue to win favor in the eyes of many Professional Hockey Writers Association voters.

3. Nathan MacKinnon, Colorado Avalanche (+310)

Coming off a Hart win, MacKinnon has to land high on this list. He is arguably the only player in the world who rivals McDavid in pure unstoppability when in peak form. MacKinnon has led the NHL in shots three times and has racked up an absurd 251 points in 153 games over his past two seasons. I place him behind McDavid and Matthews because (a) last season marked MacKinnon’s first time playing all 82 games in five years and (b) he’s two years older than McDavid and three years older than Matthews. Last season will likely go down as the peak individual performance of MacKinnon’s first-ballot Hall of Fame career.

4. David Pastrnak, Boston Bruins (+1100)

‘Pasta’ has scored one fewer goal than Matthews and sits fifth in points over the past two seasons. As a power-play monster with a devastating one-timer, he’s an annual threat for 60 goals and a lock for 50, and he’s one of four players to exceed 110 points in each of the past two seasons. Pastrnak has the ability to drive a line no matter whom he plays with. One edge he has over the other top candidates from a voting favor perspective is a weaker supporting cast. McDavid has Draisaitl, Matthews has Mitch Marner, MacKinnon has Cale Makar and Mikko Rantanen. Pastrnak accomplishes more with less. If he delivers another huge season, he could earn respect from purist voters who believe the MVP should go to the player most valuable to his team and not simply the best player.

5. Nikita Kucherov, Tampa Bay Lightning (+700)

Kucherov’s incredible 2023-24 campaign, in which he racked up a league-best 144 points, works against him here; if that wasn’t enough to win him a second career MVP, what will be? Kucherov ranks among the greatest pure scorers of his era but isn’t as sound defensively as his top competition on this list, so that nudges him into the second echelon of Hart candidates. He’s also 31 now and thus could begin to decline one of these years.

6. Jack Hughes, New Jersey Devils (+3100)

Hughes opened last season with 17 points in six games, reminding us that he was on the cusp of joining the God Tier of NHL superstars. He’s a point-accumulating machine on a loaded Devils team, and he’s just commencing his prime at 23. Staying healthy is the primary hurdle to overcome if Hughes wants to challenge for the Hart. He missed 32 games in 2021-22 and 20 games last season. If he can play 90 percent of New Jersey’s schedule this season, he’s a lock to eclipse 100 points and challenge for some major end-of-season hardware, including the MVP. But it’s clear at this point that making it through the season in one piece is never a given for him.

7. Kirill Kaprizov, Minnesota Wild (+3600)

Kaprizov, a bona fide superstar, sits top 10 in the NHL in points per game over the past three seasons, producing at an elite level despite never having a top-notch supporting cast. That could be changing, however. The hope was always that young forwards like Matt Boldy and Marco Rossi would mature into impact players and either provide Kaprizov with new linemate options (like Rossi) or take defensive attention away (like Boldy). With Brock Faber also breaking through as the team’s No. 1 defenseman, the Wild’s arrow could quietly trend upward this year. Just four seasons into his career, Kaprizov conceivably hasn’t delivered his defining performance yet. He should return to the 100-point plateau and earn some MVP consideration if he stays healthy enough to play 75 or more games.

8. Artemi Panarin, New York Rangers (+3100)

The Bread Man has been a virtuosic playmaker for his entire NHL career, but where did last season’s goal-scoring explosion come from? His previous career high was 32, and he buried 49. It was a legit improvement, too, not fuelled by any change in puck luck; he significantly upped his shot output. And yet: it came in his age-32 season and stands out as an anomaly relative to his career pattern. Playing with Alexis Lafreniere and Vincent Trocheck, Panarin should remain one of the NHL’s best scorers at 33, but it will be tough to replicate last season’s amazing output, which landed him fifth in the Hart vote.

9. Quinn Hughes, Vancouver Canucks (+4100)

If you’re wondering why I’ve made Hughes, not Makar, the lone defenseman on this list, I have a few reasons. For one, Makar shares a team with the reigning MVP in MacKinnon and thus will have a tougher time earning more votes than his teammate in any given year. Secondly, while Makar is this generation’s greatest defenseman, Hughes is the reigning Norris Trophy winner and is coming off a season in which he played a more complete defensive game than Makar. Hughes is more likely to be the player around which all his teammates orbit. Could he become the first defenseman to win the Hart since Chris Pronger in 2000?

10. Connor Bedard, Chicago Blackhawks (+15100)

The real pick here should be Matthew Tkachuk, I’ll admit. But I want to take a swing on Bedard. My colleague Paul Pidutti, founder of Adjusted Hockey, made a case for why we should expect a huge Year-2 leap from Bedard. I agree with the argument and was already on that train. The only 18-year-olds this millennium to average more points per game in the NHL than Bedard are Sidney Crosby and McDavid. Both of them went from rookies on floundering non-playoff teams to scoring champions and MVPs on teams that made the playoffs in their second seasons. Bedard has the type of talent to become a 100-point scorer and will an improved Chicago team into the postseason as early as this year. That outcome is still closer to a long shot than a sure thing, obviously, but as my pal Paul put it, the rules of traditional player progression don’t apply for generational talents. Bedard could go supernova.

Other 2024-25 Hart Trophy candidates to watch: Matthew Tkachuk, Leon Draisaitl, Aleksander Barkov, Connor Hellebuyck, Igor Shesterkin, Cale Makar, Sidney Crosby, Jason Robertson, Juuse Saros, Elias Pettersson, Mitch Marner, J.T. Miller, Roman Josi

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