There is no such thing as a place within the NHL that’s extra impactful than goalie in terms of the success or failure of a crew. The most effective ones ought to be within the working for the league’s MVP award greater than they often are.
That lastly occurred this season.
Winnipeg Jets goalie Connor Hellebuyck is the winner of the 2024-25 Hart Trophy because the league’s MVP, finishing what was one of the crucial dominant single-season goaltending performances in current NHL historical past.
Together with successful the MVP, he additionally took house the Vezina Trophy because the league’s prime goalie for the second 12 months in a row and the third time in his profession.
Connor Hellebuyck provides his identify to the historical past books with an unimaginable season capped off by successful the Hart Memorial Trophy and Vezina Trophy! ✍️ #NHLAwards pic.twitter.com/xQoF7M7QZu
— NHL (@NHL) June 12, 2025
By successful the MVP, he turns into simply the eighth totally different goalie to ever win the award, becoming a member of an inventory that features solely Roy Worters, Chuck Rayner, Al Rollins, Jacques Plante, Dominik Hasek (who gained it twice), Jose Theodore and Carey Worth.
He’s the primary goalie to win it since Worth did so through the 2014-15 season and solely the fourth goalie to win it for the reason that league expanded past six groups in 1967 (Hasek, Theodore and Worth are the opposite three).
The one draw back to all of those honors for Hellebuyck is that he’s nonetheless going to face criticism for one more disappointing playoff exhibiting that resulted in him getting benched thrice within the first spherical, earlier than settling in and enjoying higher within the second spherical. Whereas his general numbers, together with his save proportion and goals-against common, have been among the many finest within the common season over the previous three seasons, his playoff numbers have taken a major drop over that very same time interval. It is an issue that each he and the Jets have to unravel if they will turn out to be a severe Stanley Cup contender.
Truthful or not, elite gamers are in the end judged by what they do within the playoffs, and in in the present day’s “ring tradition,” regular-season efficiency does not at all times get the identical respect it ought to if there may be not a championship in that trophy case to validate all of it.
However even with that being the case, Hellebuyck’s regular-season efficiency is likely one of the single greatest causes the Jets have gained as many video games as they’ve over the previous three years — and one of many greatest the explanation why they completed this season with the most effective file within the NHL. Whereas the Jets have a great roster, it was additionally a flawed roster that at instances might be depending on Hellebuyck to win them video games.
They don’t have the season they did with out him.
He completed with a .925 save proportion, a league-best 2.00 goals-against common and a league-leading eight shutouts.
Nice goalies can flip dangerous groups into playoff groups, playoff groups into contenders, and contenders into championship-caliber groups.
Unhealthy goalies do the precise reverse.
That kind of influence is why they need to win the MVP extra usually than they do, particularly if the award really is predicated on the thought of “worth.”
The voters bought it proper on this case with Hellebuyck. No one did extra to raise their crew within the common season than he did.
