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Pearson award to be named after Ted Lindsay

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Courtesy of Alan Maki of the Globe & Mail in Toronto, we find out that one of the NHL’s awards is going to get a change done to it for the better. The Lester B. Pearson award for the league most valuable player as voted on by the players will now be known as the Ted Lindsay award. Maki tells us why naming the trophy after “Terrible” Ted Lindsay is significant.

Lindsay, now 84, helped organize the NHLPA in the late 1950s when he and a handful of others pushed the owners for a better pension plan and minimum salaries for first-year players.

If there were to be someone to best name the players’ MVP trophy after, there’s really no one better to choose considering that Lindsay was sort of like what Lou Brock Curt Flood (ed note: total brainfart there) was to the players association in baseball. Lindsay was the guy that helped knock the wall down and stand up for the players in the league.

If you’re curious about who, exactly, Lester Pearson was, he was a former Canadian prime minister who once coached hockey at the University of Toronto. Obviously his importance to the players union was huge... Or the NHL was just sucking up to an important Canadian politician. The case for re-naming the NHLs awards is often made and while we’ve grown accustomed to and love many of the names, with the Pearson award being a relatively new one (first given out in 1971) naming it after someone more significant for those who are naming the winner of the award is a pleasant change for the better.