With less than two weeks remaining in the NHL regular season, Vancouver Canucks centre Henrik Sedin will try to accomplish a feat no other Canuck has - win the league's scoring title.
Entering play on Monday, Sedin had a narrow one-point lead over Washington Capitals superstar Alexander Ovechkin in the race for the Art Ross Trophy.
The way in which Sedin is producing may be somewhat surprising. Of the NHL's top five scorers, only Sedin is playing fewer than 20 minutes per game, while the other four players are averaging nearly two or more minutes a night.
Sedin entered last Saturday's game against San Jose sitting at 99 points, but a two-point performance put him in an impressive group of Canucks who have exceeded 100 points in a single season.
That group consists of Pavel Bure, Alexander Mogilny and Markus Naslund whose primary focus on the ice was to fill the net with goals.
Henrik is showing he can put up lofty offensive numbers, but feels the success he is having on the scoresheet is coming from the effort he puts into other aspects of his game.
"Doing it without cheating a lot defensively I think it's where our line has done the best job," said Henrik. "It's not like we're having two points a night and we're minus two or three. We're doing it without costing us defensively. That's something I think we're most proud of."
Naslund was the last Canucks player to be in the hunt for the scoring title this late in a season. In 2002-03, Naslund led all players in scoring heading into the final day of regular season games when he was overtaken by Colorado Avalanche forward Peter Forsberg.
Bure is the only Canuck player to have ever won a major league award. In 1992 he took home the Calder Cup Trophy as the NHL's best rookie.
The Canucks do have two coach of the year award winners, and the man with one them, Alain Vigneault, thinks the best course of action right now is to downplay Sedin's run at the Art Ross.
"I think for everyone including Henrik it would be a real great thing, but I think him and us right now are probably trying to deflect a little bit to let him play," said Vigneault, who won the Jack Adams award in 2007.
Henrik says he is trying not to pay much attention to how his competition is faring.
"There are five or six games per night so it's nothing that I really focus on," said Sedin. "We've been playing a lot of games lately, so when you're off I think you try to stay off hockey.
With a report from CTV sports reporter Farhan Lalji
