With the Stanley Cup having found a new home last week, it was, last night, time for the Hart and the Lady Byng (along with all the rest of the NHL’s trophies for individual achievement) to make their matches. And so they did, of course, tonight, at the (big breath) 2019 NHL Awards presented by Bridgestone at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas.

As you may have heard, Nikita Kucherov of the Tampa Bay Lightning won the Hart Memorial Trophy, which goes to the player deemed to be the league’s most valuable. Originally called the Hart Trophy, it’s the league’s oldest individual award, donated in 1924 by Dr. David A. Hart, a distinguished Montreal medical man, soldier, and sportsman whose son Cecil was a long-time coach of the Montreal Canadiens. That first year, by a plurality of votes cast by a panel of sportswriters, Frank Nighbor of the Ottawa Senators finished just ahead of Canadiens’ Sprague Cleghorn.

As Aleksander Barkov of the Florida Panthers may or may not have been told, the former Evelyn Moreton donated a second trophy to the NHL’s cabinet in 1925. It was as the wife of Viscount Byng of Vimy, Canada’s governor-general, that Lady Byng had arrived in Ottawa and become, in time, a hockey fan, and she meant for her trophy to aid in the calming and cleansing of the game she learned to love. Rewarding the league’s “cleanest and most effective” practitioner, it was originally supposed to be called the Lady Byng of Vimy Cup, though the Lady Byng Trophy is what stuck and then, subsequently, the Lady Byng Memorial Trophy. Sportswriters would again do the deciding, but only from 1926 on: for the first Lady Byng, Lady Byng herself chose the winner, Ottawa’s Frank Nighbor once again.

One by one over the years the NHL added the trophies that will be handed out tonight. The Vézina was first awarded in 1927 (to Montreal’s George Hainsworth), the Norris not until 1954 (Detroit’s Red Kelly was the inaugural winner). The NHL did start recognizing a Rookie-of-the-Year in 1933, when the recognition went to Carl Voss of Toronto, though the Calder Trophy wasn’t actually awarded until 1937 (to Toronto’s Syl Apps). The Art Ross Trophy for the league’s leading regular-season scorer didn’t appear on the scene until 1947-48 (Elmer Lach of Montreal claimed it that year).

For all that familiar silverware, the list of NHL trophies that didn’t make it to Vegas is a surprisingly lengthy one. While the Harts and Byngs and Calders have endured through much of the league’s century+ on ice, many others have appeared only to disappear again — usually all in an unexplained hurry. Here, quick-like, a look at three trophies that briefly recognized the best of the NHL’s best.

The Paul Whiteman Cup

Bandleader Paul Whiteman (a.k.a. the King of Jazz) was a big North American deal in the 1920s and ’30s. Bing Crosby had his first number one hit singing “Ol’ Man River” in front of Whiteman’s orchestra; another version, with Paul Robeson on vocals, is in the Grammy Hall of Fame along with several other Whiteman recordings. News of Whiteman’s death in 1967 — he was 77 — made the front page of The New York Times. “In the era of the Stutz Bearcat,” Alden Whitman wrote there, “the raccoon coat, and the hip flask, Mr. Whiteman was the hero of flaming youth.”

He was also something of a hockey fan. Born in Denver, Colorado, in 1890, Whiteman seems to have taken to the ice at some young point in his upbringing (“on the Pacific Coast,” according to one account). Flash forward to the fall of 1928 and you’ll find him donating a trophy to the NHL to recognize the league’s leading scorer 20 years before the Art Ross came to be.

By the time the 1928-29 season had wrapped up the following March, Toronto’s Ace Bailey had surged to the top of the heap, compiling 22 goals and 32 points to nudge past Nels Stewart of the Maroons and his 29 points.

Whiteman was on hand at Madison Square Garden when the Leafs met the Rangers in a playoff semi-final, handing over the cup before the puck dropped. According to the uncharitable account of New York’s Daily News, Whiteman “wisely kept to the sideboards while doing so. The ice is too slippery for a 300-pounder to entrust himself to it.”

The Whiteman only seems to have been awarded that once: there’s no evidence that Boston’s Cooney Weiland was recognized in 1930 when he led the league in scoring, or indeed anyone else after that.

Bailey kept the trophy he’d won, and proudly. In the 1969 photograph here, below, you can spy it in the corner of the former Leafs’ sniper’s office at Maple Leaf Gardens. Today, the one-and-only Paul Whiteman Cup resides in Bailey’s hometown of Bracebridge, Ontario, where it’s on display in a cabinet at the Bracebridge Sports Hall of Fame with the town’s Memorial Arena .

The Roosevelt Hotel Clean Play Trophy

The Roosevelt Hotel is today where it was in 1928: at 45 East 45th Street, near Madison Avenue, in midtown Manhattan. That’s not too far away from where boxing impresario and promoter extraordinaire Tex Rickard opened his Madison Square Garden in 1925, on Eighth Avenue, between 49th and 50th. Three years later, Rickard had two hockey teams, Americans and Rangers, as tenants. While it’s not clear how the Roosevelt Trophy came to be, it’s likely that Rickard was somehow involved, if not directly then through the efforts of his Madison Square marketing machinery.

New York was positively awash in new (short-lived) hockey trophies in ’28. The Paramount Theatre Trophy recognized the MVP of the two New York teams, as determined by a vote among the New York Hockey Writers Association, while the Belvedere Hotel Trophy honoured the leading local regular-seasons scorer. Rangers’ defenceman Ching Johnson took Paramount that spring while his teammate Frank Boucher claimed the Belvedere.

When it was first announced in late 1927, the Roosevelt Trophy was styled (on New York newspages at least) as succeeding the Lady Byng in rewarding the NHL’s “cleanest” player. The Roosevelt Hotel was a hive of sporting activity as the trophy made its debut, with baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis presiding over his sport’s winter meetings on the property the same December week that a fancy dinner party was convened to hand over hockey’s newest prize. Hosted by Edward Clinton Fogg, managing director of the company that owned the hotel, the hockey ceremonies were broadcast live over the airwaves of New York radio station WRNY.

With NHL president Frank Calder unable to attend, Tex Rickard took the trophy into his keeping. As spelled out in the press at the time, the conditions governing the Roosevelt were less subjective than those by which the Lady Byng was defined. “At the close of the season,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle advised, “it will be awarded to the player who receives the least number of penalties during the campaign.”

The three new New York trophies were awarded once that had played out, in early April of 1928, just before the Rangers opened what was to be a successful Stanley Cup run against the Maroons of Montreal. The party, this time, was at the Belvedere Hotel, on West 48th Street. Presiding over the evening’s proceedings was none other than the man the Daily Eagle had no problem calling the “corpulent bandleader:” Paul Whiteman. (Next to him, bulky Ching Johnson looked a mere “mite.”)

For any who might have lamented the demise of the Lady Byng, well, no, it had not given way to the new trophy. A week before the party at the Belvedere, it had been conferred as usual, with Frank Boucher of the Rangers beating out Detroit’s George Hay; Frank Nighbor from Ottawa; Boston’s Harry Oliver; Normie Himes of the New York Americans; and Canadiens’ Herb Gardiner for the honour.

When it came to the Roosevelt, Boucher was only second-best. Surveying all those NHLers who’d played at least 1,000 minutes that season, NHL referee-in-chief Cooper Smeaton did the math, drawing on what a Brooklyn Daily Eagle report called his “private records” to determine that while Boucher had been penalized for 14 minutes of the 1674 he’d skated that season, Pittsburgh Pirates’ winger Harold Darragh had been sanctioned for just 10 of his 1620 minutes.

I don’t know that Darragh was on hand to receive his hardware, but I’m assuming it was delivered to him eventually. Like the Paramount and the Belvedere, the Roosevelt Trophy seems to have been a tradition that ended as soon as it started. None of the trophies in the room at the Belvedere that night appears to have survived its infancy. I haven’t come across any further mention of any of them beyond 1928, let alone a hint of any subsequent winners.

The Greyhound Cup

The Greyhound may be the most enigmatic of lost NHL trophies. How did it come about? Who did the voting? Was it awarded with any ceremony? Where did it end it up? Was Red Dutton truly as thrilled to receive it as he looks here?

Historian Andrew Ross says that the Greyhound was sponsored by the bus company, which makes more sense than a dog-backed scenario. Spend some time sifting through old newspapers and you’ll find … not much more in the way of answers. In recognizing the NHL’s MVP it seems to have been flooding ice that the Hart was already taking care of — had been, as mentioned, for seven years.

Like the Whiteman and the Hotel Roosevelt, the Greyhound only seems to have been awarded once, in 1931, which is when defenceman Red Dutton of the New York Americans collected it and posed for the photograph here. Dutton, 33 that year, was a formidable force on the blueline throughout his ten-year NHL career and, before that, with the Calgary Tigers of the old WHL. He would go on to coach and manage the Americans and, after Frank Calder’s death, served time as interim president of the NHL. It’s not really for me to say how good Dutton was during the 1930-31 season, but I might point that when it came to the voting for the Hart that year, he didn’t rate in the top five. Montreal’s Howie Morenz tallied best on the ballot, going away, followed by Boston’s Eddie Shore; the Leafs’ King Clancy; Ebbie Goodfellow of the Detroit Falcons; and Nels Stewart of the Montreal Maroons.