Why is there an age limit for the Calder Trophy?

lones78

"The Calder Trophy introduced a 26-year-old age limit for eligibility because Sergei Makarov won the award in 1990 as a thirty-year-old with two decades' worth of professional hockey experience with CSKA Moscow and the various Soviet Olympic, World Championship, and Canada Cup series..." http://blog.mlive.com/snapshots/2010/04/on_lebruns_assertion_that_red.html "To be eligible for the award, a player cannot have played any more than 25 games previously in any single season, nor have played in more than six games in each of two separate preceding seasons in any major professional league." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calder_Memorial_Trophy Apr 22 10, 10:24 PM

mikey40uf

The Calder Memorial Trophy is an annual award given "to the player selected as the most proficient in his first year of competition in the National Hockey League." With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, all of the players from the previously communist east were now available to play in the NHL. The following year, 1990, Sergei Makarov of the Calgary Flames won the award as a 31-year old. It was believed that other rookies are at an unfair disadvantage to a player who has so much more experience, even if it is in a foreign country. There were similar arguements in baseball after Hideo Nomo (first big Japanese talent) won ROY in the National League at the age of 27. MLB has not added an age limit to their award however. But then again, the first ROY in MLB was Jackie Robinson, who had experience in the Negro Leagues. http://www.nhl.com/trophies/calder.html Apr 22 10, 10:30 PM