More NHL Playoffs: | | | | | The NHL announced on Friday morning that the three finalists for the Hart Trophy are forward , forward , and forward .This is always one of the most pa sionate (and perhaps frustrating) debates when it comes to NHL awards because everybody has a drastically different definition of what it means for a player to have "value" to his team.Can a player on a non-playoff team be considered? Is a player who leads a team to a surprising playoff berth as a No. 8 seed more valuable than the best player on the best team? Ask five different voters and you'll probably get a different answer from each one. Had Crosby not mi sed the final month Alize Johnson Jersey of the regular season due to a broken jaw, he probably would have run away with the award much the same way that he was running away with the scoring title. It's po sible that he did enough from January through the end of March to secure enough votes, but he's probably not the slam dunk that he was before getting injured.Tavares, the only one of these three who has never won the award or been a finalist, was the driving force behind the Islanders re-establishing themselves on the NHL map this season. For the second year in a row, he averaged a point per game and is one of the biggest reasons the Islanders ended a playoff drought that went all the way back to the 2006-07 season.And then we come to Ovechkin, perhaps the most controversial of the three finalists. For the first half of the season, he was left for dead as an elite NHL player. He and the Capitals struggled to find their way under first-year coach Adam Oates. But around the halfway point of the season, Ovechkin started to erupt offensively and looked like the player who dominated the league from 2006 to 2010. He generated more shots, he scored more goals, and the Capitals won more games ( ).The argument against Ovechkin is that the MVP shouldn't go to a player who struggled as much as he did for half of the season. But without him, there is no way the Capitals are where they are now (in the playoffs).If Ovechkin wins, he would be just the eighth player in NHL history to win the award three times, joining a list that includes Wayne Gretzky, Gordie Howe, Howie Morenz, Mario Lemiuex, Bobby Orr, Eddie Shore and Bobby Clarke. Crosby has also previously won the award, taking it home in 2006-07, when he led the league in scoring.As if arguing over the finalists isn't enough, there's also the arguments that will be made for players who didn't finish in the top three, with Columbus' Sergei Bobrovsky, Chicago's Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews, Anaheim's Ryan Getzlaf and Detroit's Pavel Datsyuk being the most talked about. Cassius Stanley Jersey