Welcome back to WDYTT, the only hockey column on the internet that is entirely instrumental.

Speaking of unsung, the Vancouver Canucks handed out their annual team awards this week. If you missed the pre-game ceremony, worry not, because there wasn’t a lot of suspense to be had in the awarding this year.

The Team MVP was obviously Filip Hronek, and he’s obviously the team’s best defenceman, too. Most Exciting could have gone a number of different ways, but the voters went for Zeev Buium over Drew O’Connor.

There’s one more thing that we can and did predict ahead of time, and we know we’re beating an old drum here: the award for Unsung Hero will go to someone who actually got sung about pretty often throughout the 2025-26 season.

In this case, it was the aforementioned O’Connor. Who had a career season, finished third on the team in goals with 17, and became a bit of a fan favourite in a year when doing anything fan-favouring was tough.

Was O’Connor a bit of a hero this year? By the standards of the 2025-26 Canucks, he certainly was. But unsung? No way. Few players received as much praise in this market this season as did O’Connor, and that was fairly consistent throughout.

It happens almost every year. The Unsung Hero Award has more frequently resembled something akin to “Most Improved” or “Best Bottom-Sixer.” By its name, it should go to someone who doesn’t get enough credit for what they do on the ice. But then, it’s hard to give someone an award and call them unsung at the same time. And that’s especially true when the award comes from conducting a poll that includes all fans, even the extremely casual ones.

Year in, and year out, by the time someone’s won the Canucks’ Unsung Hero Award, you’ve no doubt already heard their praises being sung about aplenty.

So, when we get the chance, we like to give you an opportunity to more properly shout out an unsung hero who you think actually did not get talked about enough during the current season.

And this is that opportunity.

This week, we’re asking:

Let it be known in the comment section.

You answered below!

Elias Pettersson is MVP for leading the charge to 32nd overall and a rare good draft slot for this franchise and Thatcher Demko is runner-up MVP.

Arshdeep Bains and Joe LaBate.

Quinn Hughes for leaving.

Hard to pick a second MVP [after Hronek] on a last-placed team, but I guess I’d go with the Content Unavailable’s favorite, Petey. Most blocked shots from a forward in the league…

I dunno about MVP, but the guy I would vote most consistent is Karlsson. The guy just never seems to take a night off.

MVP is clearly Hronek, who kept up his level of play and production while the team around him crumbled.

Runner up MVP will probably have to remain vacant, since anyone that qualified was traded away.

The MVP this year was Demko and Lankinen. If it weren’t for them, the Canucks wouldn’t have a shot at acquiring top-tier talent in the draft for free.

Adam Foote for being a true tank commander.

I understand that for many, assigning an individual prize to the players of the team that finished last by a wide margin is very difficult. For this reason my votes go to LWP, the least worst player. I put Hronek in first place. This has been a horrible year defensively, and even great prospects are struggling to adapt to a system that clearly isn’t working. Despite this, the Czech was a leader, even better than Hughes in absorbing pressure and setting a good example as a veteran to the younger ones.

As runner-up I want to mention Drew O’Connor. Despite his limited playing time on the ice, he was still an example for the younger ones in terms of commitment and involvement. He scored more goals than everyone expected and is one of those players I wouldn’t want to give up for next season.

The MVP is clearly Filip Hronek in my opinion. Hard to find a runner up, but I would have to say Drew O’Connor.

You won’t get any argument on this end against the strong consensus on Filip Hronek as MVP. Honestly, in retrospect, it may be an even more slam-dunk win than Hughes achieved last year. Not because Hronek played better than Hughes, but because everyone around him played even worse.

It will be interesting to see if Hronek’s MVP performance leads to him picking up the first Norris votes of his career. Even receiving one or two fifth-place ballots would be a nice honour for him. The pick for runner-up is far more difficult to make. I hear everyone on Drew O’Connor, and he deserves some recognition for being the player to most outplay his expectations. Elias Pettersson, the elder, was probably the team’s second-best player overall, after Hronek, but then, once we factor in his expectations, it’s hard to call that especially valuable.

I’m going to go with Brock Boeser in the end. The bulk of Boeser’s production did come after the Canucks were already out of the running, and that’s sometimes referred to as “junk time,” but there’s also some value in his providing some positivity and consistency to help things from getting even more disastrous. Boeser’s improved play as the year went on, which included some decent turns on the PK, probably helped prevent at least some loss of confidence and defeatism from creeping into his younger teammates, and that’s really all that can be asked from a veteran contributor in a season like this. Sure, a league-leading minus rating looks bad, but what are you gonna do about it?

Plus, he’ll end the season as the team’s leading goal-scorer, and may have caught Pettersson for the point lead by the end of it all (he’s two points back with two games left, as of this writing).

(Wednesday update: Boeser is now three points back of Pettersson and has lost the goal-scoring lead to DeBrusk, so maybe we have to re-think this one.)

Shout-out to Teddy Blueger, too, who didn’t play enough games to qualify, but definitely and cleanly wins “runner-up MVP-per-60.”