When something unpopular gets cancelled, the jokes come easy. Usually, they’re in the form of describing how few people might be upset at the news. Something like “all seven fans must be devastated.” Usually, such comments are hyperbolic.

But perhaps not so when it comes to the annual NHL Awards. The league announced earlier this week that there would be no awards show this season, and if you missed that headline, we’re not particularly surprised. Nobody has ever really seemed to enjoy any portion of any NHL Awards Show in recent memory. In fact, Daily Hive’s Rob Williams probably nailed the one and only demographic who might be truly at a loss here.

Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s the C-listers and those who love to ridicule their awkward and stilted interactions with hockey players.

In any case, the NHL Awards Show is dead, and no one is in mourning. But, to be clear, we’re just talking about the show itself. The NHL will still hand out its annual awards in the summer of 2025. It’s just going to do it differently. How differently? That’s for the NHL and NHLPA to decide over the course of the season.

And fans of the Vancouver Canucks are particularly well-qualified to chime in on that pending decision. The Canucks have won a lot of awards over the past few seasons, including perhaps most notably Quinn Hughes’ Norris Trophy win last season. Not only did Hughes take the award for the league’s top defenceman, but he also solidified himself as a yearly candidate.

So, if one wants the opinion of fans who actually have a stake in the NHL Awards, Vancouver fans are a good source of information.

With that in mind, we’re going to list some of the potential alternate methods of doling out the awards, and we’ll ask you to imagine each scenario applying to Hughes – either last season or in the seasons to come, whichever form of hypotheticalism appeals most to you. Feel free to sound off in the comment section about which way you think is best or to suggest your own entirely different way of doing it.

This is an idea that has already been floated around NHL circles. The idea is, rather than filling a venue in Vegas with fans, players, and pseudo-comedians, the league just takes advantage of the fans and players already on hand at each playoff game.

Probably prior to a certain game, the league would invite out one award winner and present them with the trophy at centre ice. It could be a bit of a surprise reveal, with all three nominees on the Jumbotron and then one lucky winner skating out to the cheers of the crowd.

But this method has an obvious flaw, and it’s not that hard to figure out. It works well enough if the player in question belongs to a team that has made the playoffs. But if the award-winner plays for a team that did not make the playoffs, that becomes awkward.

If we imagine Hughes winning the Norris, but the Canucks missing the postseason, it’s easy to see what could go wrong. A best-case scenario would be to celebrate Hughes as a trophy winner in some far-away market where he’d be treated with, at most, ambivalence. A far worse possibility is giving Hughes his Norris in, say, Edmonton, and getting to listen to the boos rain down.

Even in a scenario in which an award-winners team has made the playoffs, there’s still some awkwardness with the timing, as there’s no real way of knowing how long any team might last in the playoffs. At most, every team that makes the playoffs is guaranteed two home games, and that’s it. That’s not much of a window in which to schedule a trophy-handing.

The idea of playoff game ceremonies for awards just won’t work out in a lot of the scenarios.

Okay, take that previous idea, but ensure that the ceremony occurs on home ice by scheduling it for the award winner’s final home regular season game.

Prior to the game, the player skates out, gets handed their trophy, and their own fans cheer them on and chant their name. That certainly beats getting yelled at by Will Forte.

But there are some serious logistical problems here.

For one, it takes the mystery out of the award. Unless Hughes happens to be playing his final game of the regular season against another Norris nominee, most fans would be able to figure out what the ceremony in question was about long before he skated out to accept the trophy.

However, a far more insurmountable issue comes with the actual voting for the awards. Most NHL awards are based entirely on the regular season and are meant to be voted on after the season has concluded. If the NHL wanted to hand awards out at the end of the regular season, it would require them to vote earlier – and probably a decent amount earlier to coordinate everything.

Nobody really wants the awards to be based on a 75-game sample size instead of the full 82 games, and for some awards like the Art Ross and Rocket Richard, it would literally be impossible to determine.

So this idea doesn’t really work.

One idea already floated around is for the NHL to create “viral moments” by publicly surprising their award-winners with a trophy presentation.

This is a terrible idea for what we hope are obvious reasons.

The NHL is obviously making a push for their players’ personalities to be more public. The Faceoff: Inside the NHL docuseries did a good job of that and included far more of the real Hughes than anyone had previously witnessed.

Overall, he came off pretty charming.

But that doesn’t equate at all to his being all that interested in suddenly putting on a show when some random suits approach him at the airport or the coffee shop and thrust a Norris into his hands.

At best, we’re getting an “Oh, wow, I can’t believe it” sort of reaction. At worst, we’re getting something much more awkward than that. The “viral moments” the NHL is hoping for might happen for one of every 20 award-winners. The rest will result in content that only demonstrates how uncomfortable “viral moments” make the average hockey player.

Please do not do this.

Here, we might actually have something.

We like the idea of an award winner’s own fans cheering them on, as opposed to a bunch of randoms in Vegas. We like the idea of something smaller and more personal. We enjoy the absence of the likes of Matt Friend and other semi-comedians.

So why not just disperse the NHL Awards Show into a bunch of mini-shows?

We’re picturing something in the summer, after the playoffs have concluded, much as the NHL Awards are typically conducted now. Except, instead of one big presentation event, each trophy is awarded in the winner’s own market and in front of their own fans.

For Hughes, it might look like this:

Rogers Arena announces a special event in which one or more Canucks will receive NHL Awards (last year, it would have been both Hughes and Rick Tocchet being feted.) Tickets are either super cheap or free, handed out in some sort of lottery system. The arena fills, the fans get hyped up with highlight videos on the big screen, and then the award winners come out to the cheers of their own. They accept the trophy at centre ice from a league representative, make a little speech into the microphone, and we call it a night. Maybe there’s a party in the plaza afterward. Good times.

The best thing is, it’s adaptable. Say a player wins an award in a market where such a ceremony is unlikely to fill an arena. No big deal, just schedule it at a smaller local venue.

Say an award-winner has plans to spend a portion of the summer in, say, Bali. No problem, schedule the award ceremony for whenever they’re back in town.

Really, from where we’re sitting, this is not just the best solution; it’s the only one that well and truly works. Let’s hope the NHL and NHLPA come to the same conclusion.

Of course, by far the cheapest and most efficient option would be to simply mail each award recipient their trophy in the mail.

And, honestly? This might be the method Quinn Hughes most prefers.