Neutral-Zone Crap: Don't rename NHL awards

To do so would be a slap in the face to some of the people who built the NHL into what it is today...That, plus the Ovechkin record chase, Situational Scoring and things that fell out of my notebook

Patrick Kane, with his haul of NHL hardware in 2016.

When the National Basketball Association announced earlier this week that its MVP would henceforth receive the Michael Jordan Trophy – it will be awarded to the Kia NBA Most Valuable Player, so there’s that – there were a lot of hockey people who opined that it’s high time the NHL rename all of its trophies. That’s presumably because there are people out there who think that if it’s good for basketball, then hockey should dispense with its trophy names, some of which have been in place for the better part of a century.

There are so, so many flaws with that logic. First, of the six awards the NBA decided to name after former players, only one of them had been named after another person already. Moving forward, the NBA’s rookie of the year will no longer receive the Eddie Gottlieb Trophy. He will now receive the Wilt Chamberlain Trophy. Makes you wonder what poor Eddie Gottlieb has done in the 33 years since his death to merit having his name replaced on a major award.