Dallas Stars: Comparing Ben Bishop To 2019 Vezina Trophy Finalists

The race for the 2019 Vezina Trophy includes three skilled goaltenders in Ben Bishop, Andrei Vasilevskiy, and Robin Lehner. And while he served as the MVP of the Dallas Stars during the 2018-19 season, how does Bishop stack up against the other candidates?

When it comes to NHL Awards, the Dallas Stars aren’t a team that you’ll frequently find on the list of winners. In fact, they’re also a team that you won’t frequently see when scanning the list of finalists with each passing year.

After the conclusion of each season, the league hosts its annual NHL Awards show. It’s a chance for the best and brightest players of the year to get together in Las Vegas and hope to hear their name called for one of the various awards.

Among those individual awards not based on postseason play are the Hart Trophy (league MVP), Calder Memorial Trophy (league’s top rookie), Norris Trophy (league’s best defender), Art Ross Trophy (league’s highest points scorer), and Selke Trophy (league’s top defensive forward), and the list goes on.

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And yet, the Dallas Stars franchise has struggled with finding their way onto the awards conversation on a yearly basis. They’ve only had one Art Ross winner in Jamie Benn back in 2014-15 (though the winner of the award is determined solely by player production). They’ve claimed the Selke Trophy just three times, with all three being picked up by Jere Lehtinen. And the last time the franchise saw a Calder Trophy or Masterton Trophy, they were still called the Minnesota North Stars.

Now, it’s not like they’ve never been close. For instance, three different Stars were up for awards in 2016. Jamie Benn was nominated for both the Hart Trophy and Ted Lindsay Award, while Lindy Ruff was a finalist for the Jack Adams Award (given to the league’s top head coach) and Jim Nill earned a spot on the ballot for GM of the Year. But even with the hefty number of nominations, the team went 0/4 at the show and came home empty-handed.

But through all of the awards, there’s one that the Dallas Stars have surprisingly never brought home. That’s the Vezina Trophy, which is awarded annually to the league’s top goaltender.

Even with names like Ed Belfour and Marty Turco scattered across the team’s past, the Vezina has never called Dallas home.

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But in 2019, it will have its best chance yet of coming to the Lone Star State.

Back in April as he was in the middle of shutting down the Nashville Predators in Game 5, Dallas starter Ben Bishop was announced as a finalist for the 2019 Vezina Trophy. And if you followed the Dallas Stars in any sort of fashion during their 2018-19 campaign, you know why.

And while his stats from this past season deserve recognition and applause, he’s not alone in the race. In addition, Andrei Vasilevskiy (Tampa Bay Lightning) and Robin Lehner (New York Islanders) were also named as finalists to round out the top three.

The funny part about this Vezina Trophy “race” is that a winner has already been determined. The 31 NHL general managers voted on a winner at the conclusion of the regular season, meaning that the “finalists” are simply the top three vote-getters in the race.

And so, we have three more weeks to wait and debate further on a race that has already been decided.

But while we await the official awards show on June 19, the question must be asked: where does Bishop rank among the other two finalists? Does he have a realistic shot at winning the award? What do the other two bring to the race?

Let’s compare the three goaltenders.