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With the first half of the season in the record books as of Saturday, it looks as if the NHL's most valuable player race is going to mirror the playoff race — too close to call at the moment.

Even if you discount goaltenders (dangerous to do, considering two of them were Hart Trophy finalists last season), there are at least six skaters making the case for MVP honours and once again, the debate will probably come down to this:

Does the vote go to the NHL's best player? Or, as the award is written, to the player adjudged most valuable to his team?

A precedent of sorts was established back in the 2002 balloting when the Calgary Flames' Jarome Iginla was demonstrably the best player in the league, winning both the Art Ross Trophy (for most points) and the Rocket Richard (as the goal-scoring leader) by significant margins at the height of the dead-puck era, but didn't win the Hart. That went to Montreal Canadiens' goaltender Jose Theodore. In actual fact, Iginla and Theodore ended up in a dead heat for the award, but Theodore got the nod on the tie-breaker, most first-place votes.

Essentially, Iginla lost the award because his Flames didn't make the playoffs and Theodore led the Canadiens to a playoff berth in the final days of the season. It was a controversial result, given that Iginla won the Lester Pearson Award (MVP as selected by the players) and the Hockey News MVP (selected by the fans). Astonishingly, despite all Iginla accomplished that year (and given the fact that there is room for five names on the ballot), one voter actually left his name off the ballot completely. In an unprecedented dead heat of a vote, that omission cost Iginla the hardware.

In the past, voters have traditionally been hard on players on non-playoff teams in the Hart Trophy balloting. Only once since the 1967 expansion has a player on a non-playoff team won the Hart: Mario Lemieux in 1988, when he won the scoring title by 19 points over Wayne Gretzky, who missed 16 games because of injury that year. Prior to '67, Andy Bathgate and Al Rollins also won MVP awards for non-playoff teams.

Now, fast forward to the 07-08 race and the favorite, in some minds, may be the Tampa Bay Lightning's Vincent Lecavalier, the NHL scoring leader. In the past 12 months, Lecavalier — MVP of the last World Cup, a key contributor to Tampa's 2004 Stanley Cup victory — took his game to a new, higher level. Many people — from former teammate Pavel Kubina to former coach Pat Burns — say he is unequivocally the best player in the NHL.

Only problem is, Lecavalier's team is currently holding down last place in the Eastern Conference standings, thanks to its ongoing inability to find or develop a front-line NHL goaltender. If the Lightning ends up in the draft lottery, does that compromise Lecavalier's Hart Trophy aspirations? Or to put it another way, is Lecavalier's season in any way diminished because Marc Denis, Johan Holmqvist and Karri Ramo are having problems stopping the puck? Essentially, Iginla lost the award six years ago because the Flames hadn't made their deal for Miikka Kiprusoff yet. Thank you, Roman Turek.

Of course, it wasn't so long ago that the Flames were down there in Lightning territory. On the first Monday of December, three of the NHL's 30 teams had earned 24 points apiece in the overall standings — Tampa, Calgary and the Pittsburgh Penguins — and all were on the outside of the playoff picture, looking in.

Iginla's Flames took off at that juncture. They played 14 games in December and lost only once in regulation, moving them from the ranks of the also-rans into playoff contention. Similarly, Sidney Crosby's Penguins made a surge as well. In the closely contested Eastern Conference standings, where 10 points separated the second-best team from the second-worst, the Penguins are on a 7-3 run and in contention for a playoff spot again, despite their reliance on Ty Conklin in goal, who is off to a 6-0 start as Marc-Andre Fleury's replacement.

Percentage-wise, the two best teams in the first half were the Ottawa Senators and the Detroit Red Wings. The problem there was because of their overall success, there wasn't a single player on either team that necessarily stood out. In Ottawa, who among Dany Heatley, Daniel Alfredsson or Jason Spezza was the team MVP? Spezza has the most points on a per-game basis; Heatley has the most points overall; but Alfredsson might be the best of the three. Similarly, in Detroit, the Red Wings continued to win despite the five games Henrik Zetterberg missed with back spasms. Does that make Pavel Datsyuk their team MVP? Or is it defenceman Nicklas Lidstrom?

On both the Senators and the Red Wings, chances are that a handful of their best players would split the MVP vote.

Crosby is just two points behind Iginla and fourth in the scoring race (but far behind in goals), while the NHL's goal-scoring leader, the Atlanta Thrashers Ilya Kovalchuk, may also be penalized — like Lecavalier — for playing on a team that may not make the playoffs.

The darkhorse MVP candidate, hovering just outside of the top 10 in scoring, is San Jose Sharks' centre Joe Thornton, who won the 2006 Hart Trophy by overtaking the New York Rangers' Jaromir Jagr in the scoring race in the final week of the season. Thornton, who joined the Sharks midway through that season, also benefited from the fact that he took a team that was outside the playoff mix when he arrived and carried them all the way to the No. 5 playoff seed. If that isn't the player "adjudged most valuable to his team," what is?

Thornton has 46 points in 40 games; no one else on the Sharks has more than 23 (Milan Michalek). So many of the players they count on to score regularly for them (Patrick Marleau, Jonathan Cheecho for two) are in the midst of hugely underachieving seasons — and yet the Sharks have more road wins than any team in the league at the moment; have virtually run down the Dallas Stars for top spot in the Pacific Division; and they're doing it with one of the least productive offences in the league.

And while the Sharks capitalized on the power play in the past, it has been a disaster this season. Thornton isn't among the power-play leaders in assists or points, after finishing second to Crosby in both categories a year ago. Thornton's candidacy will be undermined only by the fact that goaltender Evgeni Nabokov started every game in the first half for the Sharks and prior to Thursday night's 3-2 overtime loss to Calgary, had a GAA of under 2.00 (among starters, only the Red Wings' Chris Osgood and the Columbus Blue Jackets' Pascal Leclaire were also in that range, although the Vancouver Canucks' Roberto Luongo was getting close).

That, of course, brings us to the goalies, who have become more of a factor in MVP voting over the past decade after going 35 years (from Jacques Plante in 1962 to Dominik Hasek in 1997) without taking home the Hart. Last year, two of the three finalists (Luongo and Martin Brodeur) were goalies and while scoring overall may be down in the league, the number of players on 100-plus point pace is up slightly (eight reached the halfway point with 50 points or more and two others, Datsyuk and Spezza, were at 49, while Thornton was at 46 and given his second-half record, would be a candidate to get there too). That means 11 could get to 100, something that hasn't been seen since the last of the halcyon scoring seasons, 1995-96, when Lemieux led with 161 and Gretzky finished 12th with 102 points, in a split season between L.A. and St. Louis. Two others, Mark Messier and Petr Nedved, came up just shy at 99 points.

MVP sentiment started to swing towards goalies around that time, as scoring fell off the cliff and net-minders, plus a commitment to defence/the trap/obstruction were in ascendancy. If individual scoring brilliance is returning, even in an era when offence was stagnating again, the voting pendulum should theoretically swing back to position players and away from goaltenders.

Crosby, interestingly, isn't getting a whole lot of mid-season attention, even though he is clearly among the league's elite players again. It may well be a response to the fact that he hasn't achieved the separation from the rest of the NHL pack the way Gretzky did in his third season, when he won the scoring title by 65 points over the runner-up, Mike Bossy. Indeed, if Crosby maintains his current rate of production, he will finish with fewer points than he did last year when he won the scoring title with 120 points and took home the first of what will probably be many MVP awards.

The NHL wants Crosby to be the new face of the league, but to do so, he must dominate in a way that he hasn't so far — not with so many others in the midst of excellent years as well.

It almost seems as if Crosby is being penalized unfairly for the expectations being heaped on him from so many quarters. In The Hockey News' recent listing of 100 People of Power + Influence, Crosby was No. 1, ahead of commissioner Gary Bettman. Iginla and Thornton didn't even make the list.

Someone with an admitted bias towards Iginla's candidacy is his sometime centre Craig Conroy, who played with him prior to the lockout and was on his line the last time he won a scoring title, but was denied MVP honors.

Conroy believes Iginla is the hands-down Hart Trophy choice at this stage of the season, a year in which he ranks second in points, second in goals and first in game-winning goals.

"Even when our team was struggling and we weren't playing well, Jarome was still doing everything he could to will his way through the negatives," said Conroy. "That's the part — people say the team's going good now and he's scoring, but even when it was going bad, he was scoring. It's pretty amazing what he's doing.

"I was pretty disappointed the year he didn't win the Hart. Just because we didn't make the playoffs, I still think he was the best player. He was the only guy to score 50 goals. He was head-and-shoulders above everyone else. But it didn't happen. So if that (making the playoffs) is the criteria, I definitely think in the first half, this is the best I've ever seen him play — which is a lot to say because he's had some great years. Since the millennium, I think he has 30 more goals than the next closest guy. That's pretty impressive. And he can do it all. He's not just having one good year. He's been consistently good all along."

THE JAROMIR JAGR WATCH: Jaromir Jagr fascinates me, but I must be in the minority given how little is written or said about a five-time scoring champ, two-time Stanley Cup champ, who will move into the top-10 in all-time scoring at some point later this year. (Jagr had 1,564 career points through Friday, 11th all-time; Ray Bourque is 10th with 1,579. Indeed, Jagr will probably pass Phil Esposito and Joe Sakic before season's end, meaning he'd go into next season just behind former teammate Lemieux (Jagr's nickname in his early days was an acronym for Jaromir — Mario Jr.).

Jagr is also tied with Mike Gartner for most consecutive seasons with 30 or more goals — 15 — although he'll need a stronger second half if he wants to get the record for himself, having scored just 11 times in the first half, leaving him on pace for the lowest goals total in his career.

At 35, Jagr is destined for the Hall Of Fame, but after two consecutive years of finishing in the top 10 of scoring, he is nowhere to be found again this year (OK, not exactly nowhere, he could be found at 41 overall, just behind Eric Staal and Matt Cullen and just ahead of Rick Nash, Dustin Brown, Joffrey Lupul, Shawn Horcoff, Nik Antropov and Pierre-Marc Bouchard). After all these years and the frustration of losing his centre Michael Nylander to free agency, is Jagr disinterested … or at times merely discouraged?

Rangers' coach Tom Renney thought it might be the latter.

"But being discouraged is better than not giving a crap," said Renney. "He cares. He cares a lot. Sometimes, he demonstrates that in exactly the way you've said. But I know in my conversations with him — and there have been many — this guy wants to win a Stanley Cup in New York."

Jagr has no greater ally than Renney, who took over the Rangers' coaching reins for the final 20 games of the 2003-04 season and forged a curious bond with his enigmatic star. The Rangers were the only team willing to take on Jagr's contract when the Washington Capitals held a fire sale for his rights (and absorbed almost half the cost of paying him). That is how far is value had dropped in the NHL. For all the poor investments the Rangers made in players prior to the introduction of the NHL salary cap, they are getting good value for Jagr (who earns $8.3 million annually, but only counts for $4.94 million against their salary cap). In a year when both Scott Gomez and Chris Drury eat up more than $7 million apiece in salary-cap charges and goaltender Henrik Lundqvist will soon be in line for a monster raise, Jagr is a comparative bargain at his current rate of pay and why any trade rumors involving him earlier in the season were pure fiction.

Renney characterized his relationship with Jagr as good, noting that some days, "I'm the coach and he's the player and that's that.

"But we have more days when we're interactive and talking about things that don't actually have a lot to do with hockey to be honest. He's a very intelligent guy, a well-thought-out man, a very sincere person. Safe to say, I've learned a lot from him. I hope he's learned as much the other way.

"He's a good man and a caring individual and he wants badly to win."

That last part isn't always evident in the body language.

In the Ranger dressing room, at the start of their current Western Canada trip that ends in Edmonton Saturday night, Jagr insisted that he was happy all the time, even though he looked … well discouraged. Even though he's finally started to click on a line with Scott Gomez and Martin Straka (and was named one of the stars of the week last week), Jagr wasn't volunteering much insight into their collective turnaround.

"It's tough to say," hedged Jagr. "The line combination has changed. I didn't play with Marty because he was injured, 20 games. Scotty was playing with somebody else. I was playing with somebody else. Then we changed the lines and so far, so good."

Nor was Jagr prepared to anoint the Rangers as a Stanley Cup contender.

"I'm not going to comment because I don't know," he said. "The race is so tight. You lose one game, you're out of the playoffs. It's not easy. Everything is so tight. Over 40 games, it can change."

Jagr's teammate, Brendan Shanahan, who anchors the team's second line along with Drury and Sean Avery, thought the biggest single reason for optimism in the first half was the Rangers' newfound commitment to defence — and the willingness of all players, including Jagr, to adhere to Renney's system.

"As long as we don't cheat or cut corners there, I think we're a strong team," said Shanahan. "It seemed in the first 30 games or so, when we won, people talked about how we were No. 1 in the league defensively and when we lost, they talked about how we were No. 30 in the league offensively. It just depended on which night and whether we won or lost 2-1.

"That's been a great buy-in for this group, which was projected to be a high-scoring team. We always want to score, but come playoff time, there aren't a whole lot of 7-6 games. Last year, we lost a lot of one-goal leads in the third period. We just weren't comfortable in that 0-0 or 2-1 game. This year, we've been in a lot of them and we're pretty comfortable in them."

Shanahan is in his second season with the Rangers and as a result, wasn't surprised that it took Gomez and Drury time to find a comfort level.

"In New York, there are a lot of things that you're dealing with off the ice that are unlike living with or playing in any other place," he said. "That takes a bit of time.

"Our record is similar to last year's but our team is much better. Last year, we felt like we had to score three or four goals to win a game. This year, we know we can do it sometimes with one or two. There's not the anxiety on the bench in the third period, that we haven't scored enough. We trust the defence. We trust our goalie. We trust our forwards coming back hard. It's just a matter of playing in those games.

"This is a big road trip for us — a chance to turn something good into something great."

AND FINALLY: The Rangers need a win against the Oilers to avoid getting swept by the Northwest Division, having previously lost games to Minnesota and Colorado as well. They are learning, as are so many other Eastern Conference teams, that there is a statistical gap between East and West. After 70 games this season, the West had a 41-25-4 record versus the East, while the East was 29-35-6 versus the West. The reason the records don't mirror one another is because of all the times that three points up for grabs in games that go beyond the regulation 60 minutes. Accordingly, a more accurate way of measuring the difference between conferences is points earned in inter-conference play. Overall, the West leads 86 to 64 through 70 games — and that may ultimately mean it'll require more points to qualify for post-season play in the Western Conference than in the East, just like last season, when the Islanders earned the final Eastern Conference playoff spot with 92 points. Meanwhile, over in the West, Calgary got the last spot in with 96, one ahead of the ninth-placed Colorado Avalanche. Apart from the Islanders, two other Eastern teams, the sixth-seeded Rangers (94) and seventh-seeded Tampa (93) would have missed the playoffs altogether in the West. Conroy, the Flames centre, estimated it would take 96 points again to qualify in the West. With the standings so much tighter (and more teams in legitimate playoff contention) it may actually take fewer — although the Flames don't want to take any chances. "You always set goals for yourself; we're a little behind, so we want to catch up right now," said Conroy. "You figure you've got to get to 96 points, so we're a little behind that. So 48 (in the first half) was kind of the goal." Calgary managed 47.