The Hobey Baker and Mike Richter awards races are still too close to call

For most of the past several seasons, college hockey awards voters have had a pretty straightforward vote.

There has often been one player — Adam Fantilli, Devon Levi, Jack Eichel, Cole Caufield, Cale Makar, Jeremy Swayman — that stands out among their respective finalists as being an obvious choice. This year, not so much.

Talking to people around college hockey the past few months, it's striking how many different opinions there are about not only who should win the Hobey Baker or Mike Richter awards, but who should even be a finalist. It's rare that this happens, because even in years where there's some question about who should win, the guys who should be top-three for these awards are usually clear cut, with a few notable exceptions.

I mentioned this in my Hobey favorites article back in December, and even as some of the guys I mentioned then have seen their candidacies decline a bit, others I didn't even mention at that time have surged into the picture. If anything, the race might be tighter now than it was two months ago, which isn't usually how this goes. 

The awards vote that will be the most interesting this year is for the Hobey, given annually to the most outstanding player in college hockey. That's because one of the guys who's been a front-runner all year, Michigan State's Isaac Howard, has slowed his torrid scoring pace over the past few weeks, with "only" 2-4—6 in his last seven games. That's still great, but it allowed a lot of the field that already wasn't very far behind him to close the gap. There are now four players tied for the national lead in points and points per game, at 45 and 1.41, respectively.

Perhaps most notable among them is Aiden Fink, who has 7-4—11 in Penn State's last eight games, which is notable because he's been way up there in terms of scoring all season, is coming on at the right time (to the extent that he now leads the nation in both total points and points per game) and is in the same conference as Howard. Add in fellow Big Ten dynamo Jimmy Snuggerud, who only has a goal and an assist in five games since the start of February but is still a point behind the four at the top of the national leaderboard, and it's easy to see some vote-splitting come up.

The odds are that this is going to be a season with lower-scoring national leaders than what we've seen in recent years, closer to the low-to-mid 50s of the late 2010s than the 60-plus scorers we've seen more recently. That may favor a guy like Ryan Leonard, who is scoring goals at a phenomenal rate for Boston College, the best team in the country. I probably say it every time I write an article like this, but the old adage that "Hobey Loves Goals" is true, and Leonard is the national leader in both total (27) and per-game (0.87) goalscoring. For a while there, his assists were lagging way behind, to the point where he looked like he was trying to win the Cy Young, but now he has 9-8—17 in his last nine games and has dramatically closed the points-per-game gap between himself and other Hobey candidates.

That said, he also plays with other top-scoring forwards in the country, like Gabe Perreault (tied for with Leonard for seventh in total points with 41). Still, Leonard is probably the favorite at this point if the voters are intent on picking a forward, which they often are.

But even then, Cole O'Hara at UMass has worked his way into the Hobey picture with 11-11—22 in the 15 games since UMass returned from break; and crucially, because the Hobey almost always goes to a player on an NCAA tournament team, the Minutemen are 9-5-1 in those games, and are suddenly on the right side of the tournament bubble. That probably won't detract too much from Leonard's share of the Hockey East vote, but continued dominance from O'Hara could make it a bit interesting.

There really aren't a ton of other forwards who are likely to get serious Hobey consideration with the possible exception of Denver's Jack Devine, who's just had a big weekend to get to 9-36—45 in 32 games and take a share of that national points lead, but the Pioneers' season to date it probably seen as a little bit of a disappointment and Devine might not even get to a double-digit goal total before the tournament starts. Anything less than 12 or so probably torpedoes his candidacy. Devine has two defensemen on his team, Zeev Buium and Eric Pohlkamp, who are among the handful of best defensemen in the country but blue liners rarely win this award and when they do it's often because there are few standout forwards. The problem this year is that there's probably too many attackers who stand out from the vast majority of players, but not from each other as, say, top-10 Hobey guys.

Which opens the door for goaltenders to win the award for the second time in four years but only the third since the turn of the century and fourth time ever. But even here, it's hard to choose a winner. There are two very obvious candidates who will almost certainly be in the top-three for the Richter: MSU's Trey Augustine, and BC's Jacob Fowler. You can basically carve that into stone. They're the clear No. 1 goalies who have shouldered all but a few scattered starts for the two best teams in the country. Fowler is second in save percentage (.937) among goalies with at least 15 appearances, is tied for the national lead in wins (22), and has more shutouts (six) than losses (five). BC has also faced the second-toughest schedule in the country.

Meanwhile, Augustine's save percentage (.925) has dropped off a little bit in recent weeks, down to a tie for ninth among goalies with at least 15 games, but he's 15-6-4, and the clear best player on the No. 2 team in the country, which has the third-highest strength of schedule to date.

Both, though, have the problem of there being other Hobey candidates on their own teams (Leonard and Howard), and Fowler has the further negative mark of having picked up a disqualification that got him kicked out of one game and suspended for the next, for punching a UConn player, back in November. Hobey voters, who present this as being an award that's equally driven by on-ice performance and gentlemanly conduct, love holding that kind of thing against a player, especially if there's another option at the same position.

Could be tough sledding for Fowler only because of the game DQ, but Augustine in the Hobey Hat Trick feels almost likely at this point. It'll be a coin flip for the Richter.

For the other Richter finalist, you can take your pick of probably three or four other goalies to be the third man into the Richter finalists, but Maine's Albin Boija and Minnesota State's Alex Tracy seem to have the inside track there. However, Boija has the team record (the Black Bears are fourth in the Pairwise), the clear designation as his school's best player (with all due respect to Harrison Scott), the statistics (fifth in save percentage, second in GAA, 18-6-5, etc.), and conference quality (Hockey East currently has seven teams in the top 14 of the Pairwise, and Minnesota State is the highest-ranked CCHA team at 17th). Tracy, like fellow Maverick Dryden McKay before him, has been excellent for Mankato, leading the nation in save percentage (.944) and GAA (1.46). But he plays in a relatively weak conference and faces fewer than 26 shots per 60 minutes. Minnesota State is 39th in strength of schedule, Maine is seventh, and maybe that would be the difference in voters' minds.

If I had to handicap it with about a month before the start of the NCAA tournament, I would guess the Hobey Hat Trick is Leonard, Howard, and Augustine, and in that case Leonard probably wins because of Michigan State vote-splitting. And again, I'd go with Fowler, Augustine, and Boija, with probably Fowler winning.

But again, because it's all so tight right now, a good or bad weekend for anyone in the next month might change the landscape dramatically.