James Norris Memorial Trophy

He's got 21 more points than any other D, and the only guy that's got a better plus-minus than him is Ekholm, who's plus 54, and Bouchard's plus 53.

Is it no longer a debate? Conor McDavid said he should have won the Norris Trophy.

Is it no longer a

debate on how...

What are you losing? What are you so concerned about losing? I can go through the whole list of players who have no goals.

On this team, are you worried about losing one of them? I mean, Ezi, you only get one chance to lose a Norris Trophy defenseman like Jack St.

Ivany per season.

You can't stop Jack St.

Step four, work out a trade for Zach Wierenski.

Make the stipulation that you can have our Norris Trophy winning, gold medal winning, all-star defenseman.

but you have to take Conor Garland and his albatross of a contract off our hands too.

You can take a bad contract back in return if need be, but it has to be much shorter than the ridiculous six years left on Garland's step five.

Even when they do dominate, they're not really equipped to be the sort of team that you notice.

But I mean, if he keeps this up, even if the Islanders don't make the playoffs, this is Norris Trophy territory for sure.

Like he should absolutely be in that conversation.

And there's a lot of incredible guys and the fact that he might not be.

And frankly, I do kind of wonder if, can you have a situation where if the honors make the playoffs and Sorokin has been good, but not exceptional the way he was last year, He's the MVP.

I mean, there would be literally no other reason the Islanders make it aside from Matthew Schaefer.

Could he win a Hart Trophy and not a Norris Trophy because he's not really the best defenseman?

I hope he breaks the system because the Norris Trophy is so broken the way they vote on this, the way these votes trickle out every year because...

Yeah.

You're going to win the Norris Trophy? I don't know.

But he's trending to be a star.

So no issues, no debate yet about the number one player.

Oh yeah, for sure.

And then you got Evan Bouchard on the blue line, this defenseman who has been trying to kind of like break through and win the Norris Trophy in the NHL for the last couple of seasons.

The problem is, is that there's been some criticism of the way he defends, which is not, like, great for trying to be the best defenseman, right? So, like, he's coming into this season trying to do kind of what Eric Carlson did a couple years ago in San Jose, which is, like, score as many points as you can to make your candidacy undeniable.

Your offensive accomplishment is so great that the defensive shortcomings in your game are overlooked.

Quinn Hughes didn't even do this at the Canucks.

He's a Norris Trophy winner.

So this is what I'm trying to say.

You haven't done nothing.

I think Vancouver fans have a right to be pissed about what happened.

He's the captain, he's the guy, and you have to give up on a guy who's your Norris Trophy... candidate every single season defenseman very early on into his career and that sucks and for vancouver fans they should be pissed off and they have every right from his side of things i don't think it's nearly as bad and i i don't really have an issue with it i think he looked around at management and what was happening and basically said like this is not going to go anywhere that is going to be competitive and give me a chance to win and i want to um they told like go watch the old jim rutherford interviews he said like a year in advance like quinn might want to play with his brothers i don't know

he knew

he knew quinn wanted to play with his brothers like yeah they knew yeah so uh it wasn't like he was like lying and saying no no i want a beer he was saying the right things publicly yeah when he spoke but Jim Rutherford told us everything we needed to know and if you weren't willing to pick up on that then I mean you either weren't listening or you're just like naive to it I don't know not to be disrespectful but like they were telling us everything they were telling us everything we needed to know the whole time yeah you could not the day if a Vancouver fan looked at their phone the day Quinn Hughes got traded and went oh my god no way like You had to have been living under a rock.