Hart Trophy is voted, not earned on a stat — what that means for the price
The first time I cashed a Hart Trophy ticket, the player I’d backed wasn’t even leading the league in points at the deadline. He was second, on a better team, with a narrative. That’s the thing nobody tells you when you start on Hart Trophy markets — you’re not betting on the best statistical season. You’re betting on the season that the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association decides to vote for. Those aren’t the same thing, and the price reflects the voting model, not the raw output.
Hart Trophy odds price the NHL’s regular-season MVP award. The Hart Memorial Trophy is the league’s longest-running individual honour, awarded annually to the player judged most valuable to his team. The voting body is the PHWA — Professional Hockey Writers’ Association — with each member submitting a ranked ballot at the end of the regular season. The trophy is presented at the NHL Awards in June, well after the playoffs are over.
The voting structure is what makes the market interesting. It’s not a stat threshold. It’s not a player-of-the-year vote among peers. It’s a journalists’ ballot with a specific question — most valuable to his team — that’s been answered in different ways across the trophy’s history. Sometimes that means the leading scorer. Sometimes it means the player whose absence would most hurt his team. Those produce different winners and different prices. The market opens in pre-season and runs through to the regular-season finale in April, with prices shifting roughly weekly as the narrative develops.
The voting logic: narrative, not stats
The PHWA ballot is the entire market. Understand the ballot, you understand the market. The ballot asks each voter to rank the five most valuable players to their teams in the regular season. First-place votes carry 10 points, second 7, third 5, fourth 3, fifth 1. The player with the most total points wins.
“Most valuable to his team” is the operative phrase, and how voters interpret it has shifted across eras. The traditional interpretation favours the leading scorer of a winning team — the player whose offensive output most directly produces wins. That model has produced winners like Connor McDavid, Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin, Wayne Gretzky. The leading scorer of a top-three team is almost always in the top three of the voting.
The alternative interpretation — the player whose absence would most damage his team — produces different winners. A goalie carrying a defensively weak team, a defenceman driving play on a team with limited offensive depth, or a forward dragging a mediocre roster into playoff contention. This interpretation is less common but produces the upset Hart Trophy winners that the betting market often misses.
Team success is a near-prerequisite. The voting body almost never selects a player whose team misses the playoffs. The unwritten rule is that the player must be on a playoff team, which immediately cuts the field by roughly half each season. The Hart Trophy odds reflect this — players on lottery-bound teams price out of the market by January regardless of their individual numbers.
Points-per-game is the headline stat that voters anchor on, but it’s not the only one. Plus-minus, special-teams production, defensive impact, and games played all enter the calculation. The voting body has become more sophisticated over the past decade — analytics columns from the major hockey publications influence the discourse, and that shifts the voting marginally toward two-way players who would have been overlooked twenty years ago.
Pricing: pre-season opens, deadline shifts
The Hart Trophy market opens in September during NHL pre-season. The favourites cluster between 5.0 and 10.0: Connor McDavid is usually the chalk at 4.0 to 6.0, Nathan MacKinnon and Auston Matthews at 8.0 to 12.0, Leon Draisaitl and Nikita Kucherov at 10.0 to 15.0. The next tier — Sidney Crosby, David Pastrňák, Cale Makar as the leading defenceman — sits at 20.0 to 40.0.
The pre-season pricing reflects expected output more than realised performance. McDavid prices in the 5.0 region not because he’s certain to win, but because his ceiling is the highest in the league. The pre-season odds bake in the public expectation more than the model probability — McDavid has won the Hart Trophy three times in his career, but he hasn’t won it every year. The 5.0 price implies 20 percent, which is roughly accurate but compresses the variance.
The market shifts in three distinct waves. First wave: October to December, the early-season scoring leaders. Connor McDavid’s 22-plus mph speed bursts — 18 across the measurement period at the start of the 2025-26 season — surface in the analytics columns and produce momentum on his price even before the points-per-game settles. A player on a hot stretch in November can move from 25.0 to 12.0 in three weeks.
Second wave: All-Star break, late January. The voting public has roughly half the season to assess, and the prices tighten toward the actual scoring leaders. The mid-season trade deadline rarely affects Hart Trophy odds directly — the candidates are usually on contending teams that don’t move them — but the deadline can damage candidates whose teams collapse afterward.
Third wave: late March, the closing weeks. By this stage the favourites are well-defined and the prices on the top two or three candidates compress into the 1.5 to 3.0 range. The market closes when the regular season ends in mid-April; some books leave it open through the playoff start, but with reduced action.
Historical pattern: forward bias
The Hart Trophy has been won by a forward in almost every season since the trophy’s modernisation in the 1980s. Defencemen win the Hart roughly once per decade. Goalies win the Hart roughly once per decade too — Carey Price in 2014-15, Jose Theodore in 2001-02, and a handful before that.
The forward bias is structural. The voting question rewards offensive production, and forwards produce more offence per game than defencemen or goalies. A defenceman has to put up a historic season — Bobby Orr territory — to overcome the positional bias. Cale Makar at 80 points is exceptional for a defenceman but still pales next to McDavid at 130 points.
The goalie bias works differently. Goalies don’t accumulate points, so the voting body has to make an explicit narrative case for them. That happens when a goalie’s save percentage and games played are both elite, and the team’s offensive structure is weak enough that the goalie is visibly carrying the load. It’s rare. It’s not zero. Pricing goalies at 80.0 to 150.0 in the pre-season Hart market is structurally correct.
The implication for betting: the chalk position is always a forward. The structural value position is sometimes a defenceman who’s overpriced because the market remembers the bias. A defenceman at 40.0 who’s on pace for 90 points on a 110-point team is a more interesting position than a forward at 12.0 in the same probability range.
Betting windows: where the value sits
The early-season value window — October to mid-November — is where the longest prices live. A player at 25.0 in October who emerges as a genuine candidate by January often shortens to 8.0 or 10.0. The trick is identifying which mid-tier name will emerge.
The All-Star break correction is the second value window. By mid-January, the public has settled on two or three favourites and prices on everyone else widen. A late-season surge from a player priced at 50.0 in January can produce profitable closes even if the player ultimately finishes second or third in the voting. The NHL is a $6.5 billion revenue product as of 2024-25 and that scale supports a betting market with enough volume to absorb the late-season action without prices going totally sideways.
The closing window — late March — is where the chalk closes. By this point the model probability and the price are roughly aligned, and the EV opportunity has mostly disappeared. Don’t bet Hart Trophy odds in March unless you have a specific view the market doesn’t share.
The trophy market that runs parallel through the playoffs
The Hart Trophy market closes with the regular season. What opens immediately afterward — and runs through the Stanley Cup Final — is the playoff MVP market. The structural logic is completely different: shorter sample, smaller candidate pool, voter focus on team success and goalie performance. The full breakdown of how the Conn Smythe market is priced and which positions get rewarded is in our Conn Smythe odds analysis.
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Prepared by the hockeybetonline.com editorial staff.
