"With every NHL team officially finishing out the first 41 games of their schedule, it's time for the ESPN.com fantasy hockey midseason awards, as started on Monday by my colleague Sean Allen's look at the forwards. Some of the awards you see here will be familiar if you read Monday's column, but goalies are a different breed than skaters, so there are obviously going to be some tweaks.

As we reflect on the accolades of the players here, the midseason point is also a good time to obey the credo that we hear so often in athlete interviews: "It is what it is." That bit of existential philosophy can be maddening for sports reporters looking for an opinion, but it's an important phrase to keep in mind when taking a realistic assessment of what particular players are going to do from here on out. Sure, some teams could alter their makeup prior to the NHL's trading deadline, but for the most part, what you see is what you get at this point; a mediocre goalie is unlikely to magically turn into a stud down the stretch unless we've seen some of that at some point already during the first half. That being the case, it's certainly time to trim some figurative fat if you haven't done so already."