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To mark the beginning of the 2024-25 regular season, NHL.com is running its first installment of the Trophy Tracker series. Today, we look at the race for the Hart Trophy, given annually to the player adjudged to be the most valuable to his team as voted on by members of the Professional Hockey Writers Association.

The shelves on Connor McDavid‘s mantle are crowded.

He’s a three-time winner of the Hart Trophy, which goes to the NHL’s most valuable player. He’s a five-time winner of the Art Ross Trophy as the League’s regular season leading scorer. He has won the Rocket Richard Trophy as the League’s leading goal-scorer in a season and four times has won the Ted Lindsay Award, which goes to the most outstanding player as voted on by fellow members of the NHL Players’ Association. Last season, he won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the MVP of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

McDavid, the Edmonton Oilers center, is NHL.com’s choice to pick up some more individual hardware this season. He’s the favorite among a panel of 16 voters to win the Hart Trophy for a fourth time. He received 11 first-place votes and 66 total voting points, edging Nathan MacKinnon of the Colorado Avalanche by 12 points.

“At the end of the day, I want to win a Stanley Cup,” McDavid said, “and I want to win many of them.”

Ah yes, the Stanley Cup. McDavid is a 27-year-old who already has his hardware, who, unless something drastic changes, will reach 1,000 points before he hits 700 games played (982 points in 645 games), but he has never won the Cup.

That’s what is missing. And that’s what this season, and the rest of McDavid’s career, in fact, is all about.

“That’s my desire, that’s my goal, that’s my dream,” McDavid said. “That’s what I’m after and I believe that the Edmonton Oilers have an opportunity to do that. That’s my focus and that’s what I’m looking forward to going after right now.”

The Oilers came oh so close last season, losing in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final to the Florida Panthers after coming back from down 3-0 to force the series to seven games.

The pain from that doesn’t go away, but McDavid also knows it can’t be a weight he and the Oilers carry into this season.

He can’t win the Hart Trophy until the voting concludes after the regular season. The Oilers can’t win the Stanley Cup until June.

The regular season starts Wednesday. That’s when McDavid’s next journey begins.

“You can’t start from the Stanley Cup back,” McDavid said. “You have to work from Day 1 out, work towards that. I thought that was a good lesson for our group at the start of last season. I think the group is in a good head space and I think the group understands we have to go up a couple of levels here and the wins start counting for real [Wednesday].”

NHL.com staff writers Mike Zeisberger and Derek Van Diest contributed to this story.

Voting totals (points awarded on a 5-4-3-2-1- basis): Connor McDavid, Oilers, 66 points (11 first-place votes); Nathan MacKinnon, Avalanche, 54 (2 first-place votes); Auston Matthews, Toronto Maple Leafs, 28 (1 first-place vote); Nikita Kucherov, Tampa Bay Lightning, 28 (1 first-place vote); Jack Hughes, New Jersey Devils, 16; Leon Draisaitl, Oilers, 11 (1 first-place vote); David Pastrnak, Boston Bruins, 11; Steven Stamkos, Nashville Predators, 10; Sidney Crosby, Pittsburgh Penguins, 4; Aleksander Barkov, Florida Panthers, 4; Alex Ovechkin, Washington Capitals, 3; Artemi Panarin, New York Rangers, 2; Kirill Kaprizov, Minnesota Wild, 2; Connor Bedard, Chicago Blackhawks, 1