The Norris Trophy conversation every spring runs through the same zip codes. Cale Makar in Colorado, Quinn Hughes wherever he plays, whichever offensive defenceman on a contender is piling up points on a loaded power play. It is a conversation about great players, but it is also a conversation about great addresses, and last season it skipped over one of the best blueliners in the sport for no better reason than his return address read Columbus.
Zach Werenski scored 81 points. Read that number again, because it is the kind of total that used to define a Norris season, and pair it with the context that makes it remarkable: he did it on a middling team, while carrying one of the heaviest two-way workloads of any defenceman in the league, without an elite supporting cast to inflate his numbers.
| Defenceman | Team | Points | On-ice xGF% (5v5) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zach Werenski | Columbus | 81 | 55% |
| Cale Makar | Colorado | 79 | 56% |
| Evan Bouchard | Edmonton | 95 | 56% |
Put him next to the names that got the ink. Makar scored 79 and posted a similar on-ice expected-goals share, but he does it inside Colorado's juggernaut, with Nathan MacKinnon on his flank and a roster that controls play whether Makar is on the ice or not. Bouchard scored more, 95, but a large share of that is Edmonton's historically loaded power play doing the lifting. Werenski's 81 came without either luxury. With him on the ice at five-on-five, Columbus controlled 55 percent of the expected goals. Without him, the Blue Jackets were a sub-50 percent team, the difference between a playoff-quality club and a lottery one. He was not a passenger on a good team. He was the reason a mediocre one was watchable.
The workload nobody accounts for
Points get the headlines, but the truer measure of Werenski's season is how much of it there was. He plays enormous minutes in every situation, against the best the opposition has, on a team without the depth to spell him. He led the rush and killed penalties and ran the power play and defended the last two minutes of one-goal games, and the on-ice numbers held up under all of it. A defenceman who posts a 55 percent share while barely leaving the ice is doing something fundamentally more valuable than one who posts a slightly higher share in sheltered, situational minutes on a stacked roster. Volume at that quality is the whole job, and 22 goals from the back end is a scoring rate most forwards would take.
This is not a case against Makar
To be clear, Makar and Hughes are genuinely great, and in a given season either can be the correct Norris pick. The argument is not that Werenski should have won. It is that a top-five defenceman in the world was not even part of the discussion, and the reason had nothing to do with how he played. It had to do with where.
The Columbus tax
Here is the uncomfortable truth about awards: they follow narrative, and narrative follows winning and market size. Columbus does not have a national television package built around it. Its season ended just short of the playoffs, which is the exact result that gets a team forgotten rather than celebrated. And so a defenceman having a genuinely elite year became a footnote, the good player on the team that just missed, rather than what he actually was, which is one of the five best players at his position in the world.
This is not a plea for a trophy. It is a correction. The gap between how good Werenski was and how much credit he received is one of the widest in the league, and it exists almost entirely because of where he plays. That has consequences beyond hurt feelings. It shapes how the market values him, how his team is perceived, and how quickly Columbus's genuine progress gets taken seriously.
Why it matters now
Columbus is not the punchline it was a few years ago. It is a young, rising team that just spent a season on the doorstep of the playoffs, and the single biggest reason is the defenceman anchoring both ends of the ice. If the Blue Jackets take the next step, the story will be written as a breakout, a young group arriving. The truer version is that the arrival already happened, on the back of a defenceman who was quietly one of the best in hockey while the sport looked the other way. The rest of the league is about to find out what Columbus already knows. Werenski is not emerging. He is here, and he has been for a while.