Back in early June, Stephen Johns was named as the Stars’ nominee for the Bill Masterton Memorial Trophy. Today, Johns was announced as one of the three finalists for the award by the Professional Hockey Writers Association, along with Oskar Lindblom and Bobby Ryan.
It’s a bit of an odd thing to talk about who most “deserves” a trophy like this, as doing so all but necessitates comparing one player’s hardships and dark times to another’s. That’s a game hardly worth playing, in my view. One can hardly countenance comparing Lindblom’s cancer treatments with Ryan’s battle with substance addiction or Johns’s post-traumatic headaches that kept him out of the better part of two full seasons.