There are times when I read something and throw in my two cents in the bullets in the morning. But there are other times when I feel like I need to get my Blackhawks soap box out of the closet, dust it off and preach a little because folks like to overlook or diminish what some players in Blackhawks history have accomplished. Tuesday presented one of those moments.
Sean McIndoe, who has been one of my favorite writers for years, came up with a fun idea for a made-up award at The Athletic: Teemu Selanne Trophy, which would celebrate “the best combination of NHL and Olympic performance in the same season.”
McIndoe’s criteria are: “Players get 50 percent credit for what they did in that year’s Olympic tournament, and 50 percent for what they did in that NHL season,” he does include NHL postseason performance and a player does not have to have won a gold medal (but it helps).
Because I loved the idea, I read the piece. And… went directly to 2010 to see who he thought had the best “year” when that year’s men’s hockey tournament was stocked full of future Hall of Famers and had one of the all-time great gold medal games ever.
And… McIndoe gave the 2010 Teemu Selanne Trophy to… (drumroll) Sidney Crosby! Because of course he did!
I’m here to call bullshit. Sorry, Sean, but just because Crosby scored the Golden Goal and won the Rocket Richard in 2009-10 doesn’t mean he had the best overall hockey “year.”
The winner of this made-up trophy for 2010 should be Jonathan Toews. And, with all due respect to Crosby’s impressive year, it shouldn’t be close.
With this year’s Olympics seeing some remarkable performances, it’s worth looking back and remembering the ridiculous run Toews had for Canada and the Blackhawks in 2010.
Kyle Terada-USA TODAY SportsToews — not Crosby — was named the Best Forward in the 2010 Olympics. He led Canada in points, holding a Canadian mark for NHL players in the Olympics that wasn’t broken until Connor McDavid this year.
Toews followed that up with being the captain of the Blackhawks’ team that ended a 49-year championship drought just four months later. Toews posted 29 points in 22 playoff games on his way to winning the Conn Smythe as the NHL’s postseason most valuable player.
Since 1998 — the start of McIndoe’s exercise because it was the first year NHL players went to the Winter Games — there have been only 17 individual postseasons in which a player had 29 points or more. You know how many of those 17 postseason performances came with the Conn Smythe and a Stanley Cup championship?
Three: Evgeni Malkin in 2009, Jonathan Toews in 2010, and Cale Makar in 2022.
And only one of those guys won an Olympic gold medal in the same year as the other two.
My final point of consideration for Toews clearly having the best “year” and deserving this made-up trophy: he became the youngest player ever to be inducted into the IIHF Triple Gold Club. Toews was 22 years, 42 days old when he was handed the Stanley Cup by Gary Bettman in Philadelphia.
That was 16 years ago. Toews is still the youngest player in history to have a World Championship gold medal, an Olympic gold medal and a Stanley Cup championship on his resume.
And Toews was the best player in two of those three tournaments — in the same calendar year.
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