The Scott Boulet Trophy is the worst

[Matt_O 897]

This is a trophy that I have never understood, even from when I first joined the VHL. The Scott Boulet trophy is the worst award in the entirety of the league, not including the Grimm Jonsson trophy, which was given out to the best leader. Seriously? What was the VHL thinking?

 

I'm actually going to use the Jonsson trophy to draw a parallel between why that was stupid and the Boulet. When it comes to leadership, it's almost impossible to quantify with stats. How are numbers supposed to tell me who the best leader is? Simply put, they don't. It's almost the same story with the Boulet. The VHL doesn't have super advanced stats and metrics we can use to figure out which forwards are playing great defensively. The only thing we use as criteria for this award, to my understanding, is hits and points. If you get a ton of hits and score a solid amount of points, chances are you will be a finalist for the Boulet. That is dumb. Hits do not determine someone's two way abilities. Let's look at Bergeron, who has won 4 Selke's and is regarded as the best two way forward in the league by many fans. Do you know how many hits he had in his four Selke winning seasons? He had around 50 in all of them, with an outlier of 73 in one of his seasons. Sean Couturier, who won the Selke last season, had 60 hits. Why are hits the biggest factor for the Boulet? Is it because we have to make up for the lack of real defensive stats we have available?

 

How can we give an award out solely based on that? In real life, what separates the best two way forwards from the rest are things like positioning, being strong on the puck, takeaways, blocking shots, killing penalties, boxing out your man in front of the net, clearing rebounds. Do you know how many of those stats are recorded in the VHL? One, and blocked shots is hardly even considered when it comes to the Boulet (as far as I understand.) 

 

Alas, perhaps that is an unfair indictment on the VHL. After all, the NHL doesn't track many of those things either. But do you know what the NHL has that the VHL doesn't? Real games. We can watch players in their own zone, and see who is better. They also have more advanced stats to use. Do you know why you see the same guys get nominated for the Selke, year after year, but most other awards see different guys most of the time? It's because most people rely on stats for award races, and the Selke is more about the eye test than anything. There aren't many stats that track defensive capabilities, so the same guys get nominated year after year because we can safely assume they were great defensively that year. The VHL doesn't have the eye test, or advanced statistics. The Boulet is the worst trophy in the VHL.

 

If the NHL awarded the Selke the way that the VHL awards the Boulet, Bergeron would not have a single award. Last year, Brady Tkachuk and Tom Wilson would have been favorites. Perhaps Ovechkin as well, as he ranked 19th in the league in hits while scoring more points than anyone ahead of him on the hits list. Are we legitimately going to say any of those guys are Selke worthy? The Boulet is stupid and cringe and makes no sense, and we should get rid of it.

 

 

 

 

[Spartan 4,282]

my favorite VHL.com article in my (almost) year on this site, i love it!

[Bobo 487]

Amazing article. I agree with Spartan.

[Jubis 1,341]

As a major bergeron fan I always thought we missed the boat on what the vhl version of the selke trophy should be.    

[solas 1,947]

I mean at this point I would say the Boulet trophy is a power forward trophy rather than a two-way forward trophy.   I will note that I'm not particularly knowledgeable about hockey but maybe that gives it some value.  I would love to actually have a two-way forward trophy but STHS doesn't really provide us the opportunity.

 

And just to play devil's advocate - without the Boulet, would anyone even add to checking?  At that point pretty much every forward build in the league will be the same.

Edited February 7, 2021 by solas

[Beketov 8,946]

The Boulet is the only award I’ve been able to win with consistency, you quit being mean to it

 

Homesrly hits have never been a perfect metric but neither is anything else when we’re working with super limited stats. Hits are just the best option we have.

[ThePerfectNut 563]

He only needs to make articles to be more entartaining than the VSN at times
*no shots fired towards VSN tho

[ThePerfectNut 563]

Re-name it the Power Forward award for real tho

[Gustav 6,325]

I've already done my research on checking/hits/penalties. I've wanted to do an article where I dig a bit deeper and figure out whether or not checking and hits actually help, but don't currently have a good reason to get that involved as school just started for me.

 

It's something I still aim to do at some point, though--might involve a lot of manual samples and probability tests with confidence intervals though as I have no idea how to analyze the game output in the way that I'd like to analyze it. Thankfully I took stats and I know what I'm looking for so it shouldn't be too hard, just a lot of time that I don't have a good excuse to make for myself now.