Phil Kessel was the toast of Wednesday’s Stanley Cup parade despite not winning the Conn Smythe Trophy. He lead the Stanley Cup champions in points (22) and goals (10) throughout the postseason, and, it turns out, only missed the Conn Smythe by the tiniest of margins.
Conn Smythe voting is done by a rotating cast of 18 writers from the Professional Hockey Writers Association, which annually includes national media members and local scribes from the two competing teams. The league does not publicly disclose the voting results. However, TSN’s Frank Seravalli obtained the votes from each member of this year’s panel, anonymously, and the voting couldn’t have been much closer to giving Kessel the trophy.
Voters submit a ranked list of three players for the Conn Smythe, with five points being awarded for each first place vote, three for each second and one for each third place vote. Crosby finished with nine first place votes, Kessel had seven and Kris Letang brought in the last two.
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Kessel was only three points behind Crosby’s 63 once all of the votes were tallied. Crosby played a great all-around game, but in a close vote became just the third player to ever win the Conn Smythe while not scoring a single goal in the Stanley Cup Final.
The final voting finished, according to TSN, like so:
Sidney Crosby: 63 points (9-5-3)
Phil Kessel: 60 points (7-8-1)
Kris Letang: 18 points (2-2-2)
Martin Jones: 7 points (0-2-1)
Matt Murray: 7 points (0-1-4)
Logan Couture: 7 points (0-0-7)