Second Thoughts: Who Should Win the Hobey?

by Ryan Lambert/Columnist (@twolinepass)

While the college hockey season was cruelly, correctly cut short by the coronavirus pandemic, the postseason show goes on. At least in terms of the awards to be handed out.

Earlier this week, the 10 finalists for this year’s Hobey Baker Award were announced, with only one or two surprises in the mix (no Alex Newhook, who’s a shoo-in for national Rookie of the Year). Instead, we got the usual mix of mostly forwards, a couple of defensemen, and a couple of goalies.

Those guys are:

Morgan Barron, F, Cornell

Jason Cotton, F, Sacred Heart

Jack Dugan, F, Providence

David Farrance, D, Boston University

Jordan Kawaguchi, F, North Dakota

John Leonard, F, UMass

Dryden McKay, G, Minnesota State

Marc Michaelis, F, Minnesota State

Scott Perunovich, D, Minnesota Duluth

Jeremy Swayman, G, Maine

Sacred Heart’s Jason Cotton and Minnesota State’s Marc Michaelis both played in relatively weaker conferences, though did put up good numbers in non-league games. Both had fine seasons, but not enough to become the first Hobey winner from Atlantic Hockey or the new WCHA/CCHA.

As for the rest of the outfield players, you have to remember three things: 1) Hobey Loves Goals, meaning that guys like Dugan, who only scored 10, might not get much consideration despite leading the nation in points. 2) That doesn’t necessarily apply to defensemen if they’re guys who play mega minutes for elite teams. 3) It’s really hard for goaltenders to win, and it hasn’t happened in a couple of decades.

With that in mind, we can dig into the skaters here first. This is what their per-game production looked like when you consider their overall involvement in the team’s scoring:

As you can see, Dugan relied heavily on secondary assists to get to the national points lead, which is fine because he also had a primary point (goal or first assist) on 1 in every 3 goals Providence scored this season. It wasn’t a great year for the Friars overall, but the fact that Dugan had a hand in more than half their goals speaks well for him. You always have to give the national points leader some consideration but only scoring 10 himself, albeit in a truncated season, doesn’t speak well for his overall candidacy.

Next you get to a second layer of forwards: Barron, Kawaguchi, and Leonard. All were big goalscorers for high-end teams, which finished third, first, and eighth in the Pairwise, respectively. Hobey voters love that sort of thing, being a big cog on a big team, because this isn’t necessarily an MVP award (though it perhaps should be). Now, the thing to say about all this is that Leonard is way out in front in terms of pure goalscoring, 27 to Kawaguchi’s 15 and Barron’s 14.

Also, in terms of shooting the puck, Leonard generated almost twice as many shots per game as Kawaguchi did, and about 0.6 more per night than Barron. By those metrics alone, he should be considered the frontrunner of this group, but there is a “but.”

But: Leonard only had 10 assists all year, and Kawaguchi had more than twice as many primary assists than that. I think in the end that does probably end up mattering, even if Kawaguchi had such a huge bulk of his goals because he shot close to 22 percent all year.

As for Barron, whose reputation is as a “full-200-feet” type more than either of those other two — though no one would scoff at their defensive prowess — one suspects the fact that he falls somewhere in the cushy middle and the ECAC rarely produces Hobey winners unless the numbers are absolutely insane (or to say “thanks for coming back for a senior year when you had nothing left to prove”). The fact that he played fewer games and produced less in each of those games on average than Kawaguchi is the big knock against him.

On defense, things are a little more interesting. You have Farrance, who was a force for a subpar BU team and scored 14 goals from the blue line, up against Perunovich, a guy who didn’t score a lot but set up a ton, and also was that huge-minutes guy on an elite team a la Will Butcher a few years ago.

And while Farrance may have led the nation in defenseman scoring, he wasn’t so far separated from Perunovich to make it a major consideration in the end. One has been one of the best players in the country for three seasons (anchoring indisputably the best team over that span), the other had a great final year on a dead-end, lower-level Hockey East team. The choice on the blue line is clear, if that’s where voters want to go.

Finally, while you might normally dismiss the goaltending candidates out of hand like they were Atlantic Hockey forwards, I’m not sure that you can this year. McKay had an insanely successful season, winning 30 times in 37 appearances (the kind of thing that matters to voters but probably shouldn’t), but also leading the nation in save percentage north of .940. For a goalie to play and win that much and also lead the nation in save percentage is unprecedented in recent memory and thus makes him extremely worthy of consideration, except…

The other Hobey nominee from the net is the goalie who finished second in save percentage (.003 behind McKay) was on a considerably worse team in a considerably better conference. Swayman played 99 percent of Maine’s minutes this year — to McKay’s 94 percent — and faced 11.6 more shots per game, a heavier workload by half. The Black Bears conceded the eighth-most shots in the country this season but the 10th-fewest goals, and the only reason they were even hanging around the NCAA tournament picture when the season ended was because Swayman stood on his head for 2,000-plus minutes.

It’s not that McKay wasn’t great, it’s that the team in front of him made his job very easy. He faced 22 shots a night, and stopping almost 21 of them on average is nice, but it’s also in a weaker league behind a great system. But in discussing the Hobey favorites at the half, I dismissed Swayman’s candidacy because I figured Maine just wouldn’t be good enough to get him serious consideration. Turned out he alone was good enough; he was .949 in the second half as Maine lost just three times in the final 15 games.

With all that in mind, here is how I would rank the Hobey top 10 in terms of how much they deserve the award, though not necessarily who will win it:

1. Swayman

2. Perunovich

3. Kawaguchi

4. Dugan

5. McKay

6. Leonard

7. Farrance

8. Barron

9. Michaelis

10. Cotton

I would bet that the top three will be the Hobey Hat Trick, but it’s probably down to Swayman and Perunovich as the most legit candidates. I know who I’d vote for, but you never know.

Ryan Lambert is a College Hockey News columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.