The Professional Hockey Writers Association has voted by an overwhelming margin to reveal each voter’s individual ballot following the 2018 National Hockey League Awards ceremony.
After an internal debate that stretched over many months, PHWA Members voted 81.3% in favour of full transparency, in a run-off conducted over a two-week period this March. This decision will result in the publication of each of the approximately 170 ballots, within days of the NHL Awards ceremony in Las Vegas in late June.
Following in the footsteps our brethren with the Baseball Writers Association of America, the time has come for hockey writers to be more publicly accountable for their voting patterns.
The Professional Hockey Writers Association mourns the loss of longtime member and Boston Herald reporter Steve Harris, who passed away suddenly on Thursday at the age of 66.
For today’s members of the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association, Red Fisher was a link to a different time. A time before the internet, when hockey writers wearing Fedoras wrote willowy prose on typewriters, quotes scrawled on a notepad and a cigar burning in a nearby ashtray. A time when reporters and players gained trust in each other, because they had enough one-on-one time to allow for such a relationship to be built.