Lecavalier shoulder update plus some finalists for the Hart Trophy

Posted Apr 29, 2008 by Erik Erlendsson

Updated Apr 29, 2008 at 02:10 PM

I guess this is what the media world is coming to. Rather than bringing Vinny to the media for an update on his rehab from shoulder surgery, they just send in a camera and then provide a direct video report on where he stands at this point, a little over a week out from his surgery. The interview is done in the team’s training room with Lecavalier and assistant team trainer Jason Serbus.

On one other note regarding Lightning players, Jeff Halpern will serve as captain for Team USA for the World Championships, which begin Friday in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Marty St. Louis, meanwhile, will serve as an alternate captain, along with Steve Staios, for Team Canada. Shane Doan is captain for Canada.

Other players scheduled to participate in the World Championships are: Finland - Jussi Jokinen and Karri Ramo; Russia - Evgeny Artyukhin; Czech Republic - Filip Kuba. The preliminary rosters are listed on the IIHF website. Final rosters are to be submitted on Thursday, from what I can tell.

And finally, the finalists for the Hart Trophy were announced today by the league, and they are

Jarome Iginla - Calgary
Evgeni Malkin - Pittsburgh
Alex Ovechkin - Washington

Ovechkin will almost certainly be a runaway winner of the award, and it might be close to being unanimous. But I know for a fact it won’t be unanimous, because….....

My votes were:
1. Martin Brodeur - New Jersey
2. Ovechkin
3. Iginla
4. Nicklas Lidstrom - Detroit
5. Malkin

I wrestled with this decision many times in the final weeks leading up to the end of the season. My sway was toward Brodeur for a lengthy period of time. Then as Washington kept staying in the mix and Ovechkin kept piling up the goals, I started to have some secondary thoughts as to who my vote should go to. In some conversations down the stretch, I was starting to lean toward Ovechkin. But I just couldn’t get this one thought out of my head in regards to Brodeur - the Devils would be a middle-of-the-road team if not for him. And I know it’s easy to say that about any team in regards to their goaltender. But what gets me about Brodeur is that you can change the coach in New Jersey, you can alter the system in New Jersey, you can take away a pair of Hall of Fame defenseman away from New Jersey and yet at the end of the year, there’s Brodeur with 40 wins and in the top 10 in goaltending once again while New Jersey is competing for a division/conference title, which they were up to the final few weeks of the season before Pittsburgh and Montreal pulled away. The Devils were one of the lowest scoring teams in the league while Patrik Elias had a subpar season, and yet New Jersey earned a No. 4 seed. And I believe that if you took Brodeur out of net for the Devils, they would have been a lot closer to Tampa Bay in the standings than Pittsburgh. And to me, that’s the true measure of the player “judged to be most valuable to his team’’