|
What Do They Have Against the Goalies? |
|
|
|
|
|
What goes round comes round. By definition, goalies deny entry and now they can’t gain admission to the Hockey Hall of Fame.
There are 39 enshrined, a disproportionate 28 of them before 1980. It’s gotten harder to get in than it was to get inside Tom Barrasso’s circle of trust. A former goalie, John Davidson, conducts the selection meetings but it’s not all up to him, of course. There’s must be others–embittered six-goal scorers undoubtedly–hugging the post to keep the guys with the masks out.
Rogie Vachon, the principal goaltender for two Montreal Cups and the winner of 355 hard-earned victories with mostly bad teams in Los Angeles and Detroit, waited 31 years after retirement until being elected in 2016. There were nine years between Billy Smith (1993) and Grant Fuhr (2003) when a goalie was not chosen. Once Marty Brodeur, the all-time winner in wins and the wearer of three rings, sails in next year, it’s possible the next goalie to follow him has yet to be born.
We’re serious about that. If some candidates with serious credentials haven’t been elected by now, you wonder when.
If I was a one-man committee, Mike Richter, the principal reason for the watershed 1996 United States World Cup victory and the winner of the Rangers’ only Cup in 77 years, would be in, no matter how much his win totals suffered for playing his final five seasons on non-playoff teams, no fault of Richter’s.
Barrasso won two Cups, a Vezina (with three more top-five finishes) and is 18th all-time in wins, credentials for the hockey Hall of Fame, if not for the Congeniality Hall of Fame. Personality didn’t keep Ed Belfour and Terry Sawchuk out, nor should it ever.
With no Cups and no Vezinas but the fifth amount of wins ever, Curtis Joseph has become the Bert Blyleven of hockey. Blyleven eventually and justifiably got in on his final year of eligibility, and Joseph, who never played on the best team or even on one of the best four teams, would certainly not cheapen the hall. Longevity counts for a lot, as does winning some series for inferior teams, which Joseph did a few times. We saw Richter do that, too, in stoning the heavily favored Devils in 1997 on the third semifinal run of his career.
Tim Thomas has a Cup and a two Vezinas but, as a late bloomer, perhaps not the volume of work. How do you argue with three Cups by Chris Osgood? Fairly easily, actually. When writers listed the keys to each series for his teams, did any of them ever write, “Have to solve Osgood.”? Like Mike Vernon (Cups with two different teams and one second place Vezina finish), Osgood was good and probably underrated, just never great.
We don’t know what goes on inside that selection room. We’re guessing that anyone who ever gave up a goal to Mark Osborne is automatically disqualified, but we can’t say for sure. We do believe that that the game being what it is today, standards are only going to get tougher and we’ll get to those reasons why.
But first: With the lopsided number of honored members in favor of pre-expansion goalies, are the bigger, better guys of today being judged by a harsher standard?
You really can’t compare. It was a different game, played, if you go way back, with much different rules. So we got no beef about Percy LeSueur, and it’s not Bouse Sutton’s fault for never playing in an NHL that did not yet exist, either. Shouting out injustices into cemeteries is pretty tacky. And our text messages to people who watched these pioneers play went unreturned.
Besides, the purpose of this piece is not to unmask goalies who never wore one, but to kick out a few low, hard ones, about the state of the art today. The waiting list above is going to become more and more crowded. It will be more difficult to get in, because it has become harder to stand out.
As an entity, goalies have gotten too good for their own good. We have been covering the NHL since 1974, when there were a select handful of teams capable of winning a Cup, in part because there were only about five goalies who were good enough to get that job done. Because of the early retirements of Ken Dryden and Bernie Parent, from 1980-83 Smith was the only active netminder with a ring, in his case four.
Today’s goaltender is far more athletic, better coached and much better protected by both his equipment and his team. There is nowhere close to the dropoff from the top guys to the fair-to-middling’ goalies that there was in the eighties. We dare say there are 20 goalies in the NHL with which a team could win all four rounds, so strong is the defensive structure in front of them.
Jacques Demers used to make the argument that the coach was as valuable as a team’s fifth best player and should be paid accordingly. Now defensive responsibility and shot blocking win a lot more games that do goalies, so maybe the coach is the most essential piece and the goalie just another important cog in the wheel. Three or four big stops have become a good night. It used to take 10 acrobatic saves just to make the goalie the second star.
The Hall committee has a tough job, better performed with only a secondary reliance on stats. Goals Against Averages are worthless evidence. All you are doing is comparing the scoring in wildly different eras. Could Johnny Bower, Jacques Plante, Terry Sawchuk, Glenn Hall, Lorne Worsley–the representatives of the golden age of goaltending in the fifties and sixties, even play today, when goalies don’t have body types inspiring nicknames like Gump or are called on to play 70 games a season? The way today’s players shoot and pass, 55 starts has been judged a heavy load, all the more reason that few goalies in this generation and the next will be able to accumulate the win totals used as measures of Hall worthiness.
Jonathan Quick and Corey Crawford have won two Cups each, which certainly will someday get them into the conversation. Multiple championships may even make admission guaranteed, as the chances for dynasties diminish in the Cap era, never mind that we have had three franchises account for seven of the last eight Cups.
It is still our belief that the salary cap will resume making that the exception, not the rule. As the league grows, the volume of teams has made it that much harder to win and there are going to be a lot of cases similar to Joseph’s.
In fact, they already exist. Carey Price has won a Hart and Vezina, but in 11 years has yet to get his team past a second round. Roberto Luongo is fourth in all time wins, and has made just one final, like Henrik Lundqvist, who is 17th in victories. And Braden Holtby has never reached the third round.
Two semifinals is the best that Ryan Miller, 19th all-time in wins, has been able to do, Pekka Rinne has made one final, been three times to the second round. Tuukka Rask has made four second rounds and that’s all. So one Cup from one magical spring may loom large, but then that’s not going to enshrine Cam Ward or Marc-Andre Fleury–in his case one-and-a-half Cups–based on their complete portfolio and the standard apparently being set by the committee.
We don’t trust save percentage as a benchmark. It doesn’t tell the quality of shots, and neither, as we said, does goals against average: Three of the first five career numbers of all time are from ancient times before the forward pass. We will say this, though: Seventh all-time is Dominik Hasek, despite his playing in much more open times, why he got in, no questions asked, after just one championship;
There was nothing exciting about Grant Fuhr’s numbers but he closed up the back end for the most offensively gifted and wide-open team there ever was. Towards four Edmonton Cups, Fuhr was as important as Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier.
Statistics and damn lies. All things considered, it mostly comes down to a final eye test, with a hearing test thrown in whenever the shooters of the day tell you who intimidated them to miss the net. Comparing stats to those of the already enshrined is a necessary discipline leading to a credible opinion. But if the selection committee members vote like I do for the Baseball Hall of Fame, this is the bottom-line question: Do you think of this player as a Hall of Famer?
As we said, longevity is critical, and not only in terms of the years a goaltending candidate performed at the highest level. He may have to live forever to see himself enshrined.
Blogger •NHL Hall of Fame writer • 
Join the Discussion:
»