2026 NHL Awards: Every Winner

Nikita Kucherov was sitting in a TV studio, minutes from a Stanley Cup Final broadcast, when the NHL told him he was the league's MVP. No tuxedo, no red carpet, no Las Vegas stage. That is how the 2026 NHL Awards went, start to finish: the league scrapped the gala and scattered its trophies across two weeks of surprise reveals, from a hospital room to a golf course to a pregame set. We call it The Rolling Reveal, and it crowned everyone from a 37-year-old playoff MVP to an 18-year-old rookie defenseman.

Here is every major 2026 winner, who they beat, and the number that won it. We called the finalists back in the spring; this is how the votes actually landed.

Two weeks apart, the same award season crowned the oldest Conn Smythe winner in history and the youngest Calder winner in history. That spread is The Rolling Reveal in a single image.

2026 NHL Awards: The Full Winners List

Ten major trophies, ten winners, each with the mark that earned it. Three of them belong to the Tampa Bay Lightning, who quietly ran the table on individual hardware.

Kucherov Wins the Closest Hart in Decades

The Hart was a genuine three-way fight, and that almost never happens. Nikita Kucherov took it on the strength of 130 points (44 goals, 86 assists) in 76 games and a league-best 1.71 points per game, his second Hart after 2018-19. The vote was the tightest in a generation: Kucherov drew 72 first-place votes to Connor McDavid's 68 and Nathan MacKinnon's 52, the first time since 1995-96 that all three finalists each pulled at least a quarter of the first-place ballots. The league announced it June 11, before Game 5 of the Final.

Kucherov is now the first Lightning player to win the Hart twice, and the fact that he did it on a team built around Andrei Vasilevskiy and Jon Cooper, both of whom won their own hardware this year, tells you how deep Tampa's individual season ran.

The writers picked the most valuable player; the players picked the best player. In 2026 those were two different men, and both answers were right.

— Mike Johnson, NHL Senior Editor

McDavid's Quiet Haul: Ted Lindsay, Art Ross, No Hart

Connor McDavid had the best raw season in the league and still lost the MVP, which is its own kind of 2026 story. He led the NHL with 138 points (48 goals, a league-leading 90 assists) to win the Art Ross for the sixth time, tying Mario Lemieux for the second-most ever behind Gretzky. Then the players handed him the Ted Lindsay Award as the most outstanding player, his fifth, which ties Gretzky's all-time record. His family surprised him with it at a golf course on June 7.

So McDavid swept the scoring title and the players' vote but not the writers' Hart. The finalist trios were not even the same: the Ted Lindsay three were McDavid, Kucherov, and Macklin Celebrini, with Celebrini in for MacKinnon. Splitting the two MVP awards between the scoring champion and a slightly-less-productive winger is rare, and it is exactly why both votes were worth having.

Schaefer, Werenski, and Vasilevskiy

The Calder was the least controversial call of the year and the most historic. Matthew Schaefer, the 2025 first-overall pick and an 18-year-old defenseman, was a unanimous winner, first on all 198 ballots, the first unanimous Calder since Teemu Selanne in 1992-93. At 18 years, 233 days he is the youngest Calder winner ever, and his 23 goals broke Phil Housley's scoring records for an 18-year-old blueliner. He topped a strong rookie class that included Ivan Demidov and Beckett Sennecke, both of whom out-pointed him; voters rewarded the impact, not the point total.

Zach Werenski won the Norris as the first Columbus Blue Jacket ever to take it, earning first-place votes on 113 of 198 ballots, 66 clear of runner-up Cale Makar, behind an 81-point season (22 goals, 59 assists) and nearly 27 minutes a night. In goal, the Vezina went to Andrei Vasilevskiy, who led the league with 39 wins to go with a 2.31 GAA and .912 save percentage, his second Vezina and first since 2018-19.

Staal's 37-Year Apex

The signature image of the 2026 awards belongs to Jordan Staal. At 37 years, 277 days he became the oldest Conn Smythe winner in history, passing Tim Thomas, after leading all skaters with six goals in the Final and scoring in each of the series' first five games. Carolina beat Vegas in six to win the Cup, and Staal became the first player to go 17 years between championships, from Pittsburgh in 2009 to Carolina in 2026.

It is the kind of award that reframes a career. Staal was never the best player on his teams, but he was the most important one in June, and the Conn Smythe finally put a signature trophy on a 1,200-game body of work.

A 37-year-old won the playoff MVP and an 18-year-old won the rookie of the year in the same fortnight. Hockey almost never hands you both ends of a career arc at once.

— Mike Johnson, NHL Senior Editor

The Ceremony That Wasn't

The format change is the quiet headline. There was no single 2026 awards show. Jon Cooper was surprised with the Jack Adams at Tampa General Hospital on June 3, beating finalists Lindy Ruff of Buffalo and Dan Muse. Nick Suzuki got the Selke on June 5, surprised by teammate Cole Caufield, the third Canadien ever to win it. MacKinnon's Rocket Richard and McDavid's Art Ross were settled by the regular-season stats back in April, as scoring awards always are. Colorado's big regular season at least produced the goal-scoring crown.

Whether the league keeps this format or brings the gala back is an open question heading into the offseason. The surprise reveals played well on social video, but they also buried some genuinely great individual seasons under a two-week drip. The hardware deserved a stage. In 2026 it got a hospital room and a golf course instead.

Sources and Reporting

• NHL.com: official award announcements, winners, vote totals
• ESPN: awards coverage and finalist context
• TSN: NHLPA Ted Lindsay reporting
• Sportsnet: Hart and Conn Smythe coverage
• NHLPA: Ted Lindsay Award vote
• Daily Faceoff: finalist and voting context

The Verdict: The Rolling Reveal

The 2026 NHL Awards gave us a worthy class. Kucherov over McDavid in a coin-flip Hart, Schaefer's unanimous Calder, Werenski breaking Columbus's drought, Staal's 37-year apex. But The Rolling Reveal is the part the league has to answer for. You do not get a three-way MVP race and a unanimous rookie and the oldest Conn Smythe ever in the same June very often. When you do, those moments deserve a shared stage, not a string of surprise drops that each lived for one news cycle. Bring the show back, and let the next great class take a bow together.