The Hart Trophy conversation keeps circling back to the same three names - Nikita Kucherov, Connor McDavid and Nathan MacKinnon - and for good reason. Over the past five seasons, they’ve owned the league’s MVP race, and in the last three years they’ve taken all but two of the nine finalist spots. Kucherov is the reigning winner, claiming the award for the second time, and the bar for everyone else remains brutally high.
Still, a few stars have a path to crash the party for 2026-27 if everything breaks right. The formula is pretty clear: elite production, a team that wins, and a season that leaves voters with no easy way to look elsewhere.
Jason Robertson checks a lot of those boxes. He’s on one of the league’s best teams, and Dallas has plenty to prove after another early playoff exit.
Robertson was the Stars’ best player last season, finishing with 45 goals and 96 points while pushing toward 50 and 100. He’s also playing on a one-year deal after a long negotiation, and at 27 he’s in the prime years of his career.
If he gets to 50 goals for the first time, finishes top five in scoring, and helps drive another big season in Dallas, he could absolutely work his way onto the Hart finalist list.
Cale Makar has his own contract angle, and it’s a big one. He’s entering the final season of a six-year, $54 million deal signed in 2021, which means a massive raise is coming.
Makar was excellent for Colorado in 2025-26 even if he didn’t look quite 100% himself, still producing 20 goals and 79 points in 75 games. He was ninth in league scoring the year before with 92 points, and a healthier version of Makar could take another leap.
If he pushes toward 100 points, he’d become just the seventh defenseman in league history to hit that mark, which would make a serious Hart case.
Nick Suzuki is another name with real momentum behind it. Montreal spent the offseason building up one of the league’s best young cores and locking in nearly all of them on favorable contracts, and Suzuki sits at the center of it.
He just posted career highs with 72 assists and 101 points, and he added his first Selke Trophy as the league’s best defensive forward. With Cole Caufield and Juraj Slafkovsky both trending up, Suzuki is the engine.
If he gets back to 100 points, scores 30 goals and repeats that Selke-level impact, it’s going to be hard to keep him out of the finalist mix.
Then there’s David Pastrnak, who keeps doing superstar things for a Bruins team stuck somewhere between contention and a rebuild. He’s been a Hart finalist before, when he put up 61 goals and 113 points in 2022-23, and he’s still arguably the league’s second-best winger behind Kucherov.
Pastrnak has four straight 100-point seasons, and with J.J. Peterka now in the picture, there’s a chance his playmaking climbs again.
If he drags Boston to a top-three finish in the Atlantic Division and lands in the top five in scoring once more, voters will have a tough time looking past him.
That’s the challenge in this era: MacKinnon, McDavid and Kucherov have set the standard so high that everyone else is fighting uphill. But Robertson, Makar, Suzuki and Pastrnak all have a believable route to a Hart Trophy run if the season breaks their way.
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The Bruins have spent the summer hearing plenty about the lineup around David Pastrnak, and most of it has centered on whether Boston can do enough down the middle to keep up in a tightening Eastern Conference. Pastrnak got his own nod from NHL Network as the second-best winger in the league right now, but the more uneasy news for Boston came from a recent Athletic ranking that left the clubs top centers near the bottom of the NHL picture.
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David Pastrnak's Value Just Put Bruins Pressure In Plain Sight
David Pastrnak keeps turning value into a Bruins talking point, and the latest reminder comes from outside the organization. NHL Network ranked him the second-best winger in the league, a nod to both his production and the way he stacks up against the games other elite scorers. For Boston, the bigger issue is not just how good Pastrnak is, but how much the team is getting out of a contract that looks especially favorable when placed next to deals for players like Kirill Kaprizov and Mitch Marner.
Pastrnaks sixth-place finish in Hart Trophy voting only sharpened the picture of how indispensable he has become. The Bruins have long benefited from having a true star in his prime, but the conversation around him keeps drifting back to whether enough talent has been put around him to make the most of it. His bargain status should be a luxury, yet it also reads like pressure, because a player this valuable makes roster shortcomings easier to see. [Read more 🡒]