Evgeni Malkin named Penguins 2019-20 team MVP

The Penguins announced yesterday that Evgeni Malkin has been named team MVP for 2019-20.

For Malkin it’s his fifth career time with this honor, that has basically been traded off between Malkin and Sidney Crosby in the last 15 years, with a splash of Marc-Andre Fleury.

Back in May in the stoppage time, we forecasted this and other awards, which the team hasn’t formally announced just yet.

Here’s the Pens on the announcement:

Pittsburgh Penguins forward Evgeni Malkin has been named team MVP for the 2019-20 regular season. The annual team award is voted on by the players.

Malkin has been named team MVP for the fifth time in his career. Only hall-of-fame owner Mario Lemieux (12) and team captain Sidney Crosby (8) have won the award more than Malkin.

The 34-year-old alternate captain was arguably Pittsburgh’s most consistent player all season, finishing with 74 points (25G-49A) in 55 games. Despite missing 14 of Pittsburgh’s 69 games this season, Malkin finished 14th in the NHL in scoring while his 1.35 points-per-game average was tied for sixth-best in the league. His 0.89 assists per game (49 assists in 55 games) ranked fourth in the NHL behind Connor McDavid (0.98), Leon Draisaitl (0.94) and Artemi Panarin (0.91).

A constant theme to the Penguins’ season was the team’s inability to stay healthy as their 302 man-games lost were fourth-most in the NHL. However, it seemed that when some of Pittsburgh’s best players were out of the lineup, Malkin did his best work. He was downright dominant in the 28 games that Crosby missed due to a core muscle injury from Nov. 12-Jan. 12, as he had a team-best 38 points (11G-27A) in the 26 games he played, helping the Penguins to an 18-6-4 record and league-best .714 points percentage during that span.