Conn Smythe Win the Ultimate Achievement of Duncan Keith's Brilliant Career

Duncan Keith has enjoyed a fantastic career. He's universally recognized as one of the NHL's best defencemen, twice winning the Norris Trophy and receiving votes in each of the last seven seasons. Prior to this year, he had been the No. 1 defenceman for two Stanley Cup-winning teams.

So when I write that his Conn Smythe-winning performance in the 2015 Stanley Cup playoffs has been the finest of his entire career, it's important to understand the full meaning of that assertion.

Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press

Even without the exceptional circumstances involved in this run, Keith's performance was outstanding. His 21 points in the playoffs were the second-best total on the team, tied with Jonathan Toews and behind only Patrick Kane. He made significant offensive contributions in all four rounds and would have been a top contender for the Smythe under any conditions.

What made this run so special, though, was that the Blackhawks played the 13 games of the final two rounds of the postseason with essentially only four defencemen. An injury to Michal Rozsival, along with a lack of trust in the team's deeper options by the coaching staff, meant that an unprecedented load fell on the shoulders of the team's top four.

More than anyone else, it was Keith who shouldered that load.

Partway through the second period, Sportsnet's broadcast announced that Keith had become the fourth defenceman since the NHL started tracking ice time to play 700 minutes in a single postseason, joining Drew Doughty, Chris Pronger and Nicklas Lidstrom.

Player	Year	Games	Goals	Assists	Points	Avg. TOI
Nicklas Lidstrom	2002	23	5	11	16	31:10
Chris Pronger	2006	24	5	16	21	30:57
Drew Doughty	2014	26	5	13	18	28:45
Duncan Keith	2015	23	3	18	21	31:06

Given that the Blackhawks only went to seven games in one of four series, it was a truly remarkable achievement. He averaged more than 31 minutes per game, never seeming to wear down even as coach Joel Quenneville trusted him with more and more minutes.

The truest indication of just how good Keith was may be the percentage of the team's goals that he was on the ice for. Two out of every three goals Chicago scored in the playoffs happened with Keith out there; he was on the ice for 46 of the 69 and picked up a point on nearly half of those. The Blackhawks also allowed 60 goals; Keith was on the ice for just 25 of those.

In 23 games, the Blackhawks outscored the opposition by a whopping 21 goals when their best defenceman was on the ice. None of those goals was more important than the one Keith himself scored in Game 6:

There was something else unique about this run. In recent years, Chicago has done something interesting with its defence, leaning on Niklas Hjalmarsson and Johnny Oduya as its shutdown tandem and freeing up Keith and regular partner Brent Seabrook for more offensive minutes. That changed this year, as Keith and Hjalmarsson played significant minutes together and drew the toughest opposition of the playoffs.

Keith wasn't physically dominant in the shutdown role; the 6'1", 192-pound defenceman is a little on the small size by NHL standards. Instead he relied on speed and hockey sense, as the Globe and Mail's James Mirtle wrote back in May:

"

[Keith] plays half the game, and he somehow pushes the pace in every shift. But playing fast isn't only about his marvelous skating; it's about thinking fast, something that's become harder to do as the sport shifts into hyper-drive.

Keith's strength isn't so much that he's in better shape than everyone else; his strength is that he doesn't need to be because he knows where to be on the ice.

"

Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press

When Gary Bettman handed the Conn Smythe Trophy to Keith, he called him the "unanimous selection" of the award's voters. Looking at his performance over the postseason, it's easy to see why.

For his part, Keith unsurprisingly deflected praise to his teammates in a postgame conversation with Sportsnet's Scott Oake.

"You don't win a championship without everybody," Keith told Oake. "I know that might sound cliche to pass it off on teammates, but it really is true with hockey. It's an unbelievable team game and we had everyone going from top to bottom, and that's what you need."

To a point, he's right. One player really can't carry an NHL team on his back to the championship, and Chicago had superb stars on its top two lines and got massive contributions from its depth players, especially on the road when the Blackhawks couldn't control the matchups. Looking at the team's roster, it's easy to pick a half dozen or more players who performed spectacularly along the way.

But it's a certainty that Chicago wouldn't have won without Keith. He played against the best the league could throw at him, played as many minutes as the coaches could give him, and did as well in those minutes as any player realistically could. Even matched against what he's done in previous years, there's no question this was the finest performance of his career to date, the moment where, like Kane and Toews before him, he was the single most important player on a Stanley Cup-winning Blackhawks team.

Statistics courtesy of War-on-Ice.com and NHL.com. 

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.