To celebrate the announcement of the 2014 Hockey Hall of Fame Inductees today, what I decided to do is to create a Mock Selection using our Hockeybuzz bloggers. The bloggers who took part in this activity were Scoop Cooper, Mike Augello, Bill Meltzer, Adam French, Jan Levine, Tony Dean, John Jaeckel, Colin Dambrauskus, Peter Tessier, and myself. What I hope comes across in this blog is to show exactly how hard it is for someone to get Inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Every year at this time media and fans alike complain when their person isn’t selected to the Hall. The way I organized this process was to do it as close as I could to what the actual Hockey Hall of Fame Selection Committee is doing. Obviously, there are certain aspects of the Selection Committee that remain private to the Hockey Hall of Fame so I did the best I could.
The Hockey Hall of Fame’s Selection Committee consists of 19 members from all aspects of the hockey world. They are:
John Davidson (Chairman) Jim Gregory (Chairman Emeritus- non-voting role) Scotty Bowman David Branch Brian Burke Colin Campbell Bob Clarke Eric Duhatschek Mike Emrick Michael Farber Marc de Foy Mike Gartner Anders Hedberg Igor Larionov Lanny McDonald David Poile Luc Robitaille Peter Stastny Bill Torrey
I want you to notice in this that first of all each member of this Committee covers the NHL, the IIHF, the CHL, Hockey Canada, USA Hockey, written and TV media in both French and English, as well as representatives of Honoured Members of the Hockey Hall of Fame. What you also should notice is that NONE of these members of the Committee works for the Hockey Hall of Fame. They are there as volunteers and it is they who take the heat from the media when certain people don’t get in.
For someone to be elected to become an Honoured Member of the Hockey Hall of Fame, they must get 75% of the vote amongst the Selection Committee. Each member of the Committee can nominate 1 person for the Player Category, 1 person for the Builder Category, and 1 person for the Officials Category. This is where the pool of players come from for the members of the Selection Committee to vote on, they cannot vote on anyone outside of these nominations. There can only be 5 members Inducted to the Hockey Hall of Fame each year. Up to 4 players can be Inducted on any given year as well. In regards to the Builder and Officials Categories, there can be two Builders inducted on any given year ONLY IF there is not an Official nominated, vice-versa goes with Officials.
After each member of the Committee makes their nominations, they then vote on them. If after the first ballot there are nominations who have gained 75% of the vote, they are considered to be elected into the Hockey Hall of Fame. After that ballot, if they only have 2 or less players officially elected, then they can do another vote for those who got 50% of the vote or more. Anyone who got less than 50% are dropped off the ballot. In this case, things can get interesting as members of the Committee get weighted votes depending on how many players were elected in the first ballot.
In our Mock Selection, we only had 10 members of our Committee. Due to that fact I had to make a slight change of our percentage to be 70% instead of 75% for simplicity’s sake. I had each member of our Committee to nominate 1 player and 1 builder or official to make things run a little quicker as well. Here is the pool of players and who nominated each one.
Adam Kirshenblatt- Player: Carl Brewer Builder: Don Cherry Scoop Cooper- Player: Gary Roberts Official: Kerry Fraser Mike Augello- Player: Curtis Joseph Builder: NONE Bill Meltzer- Player: Doug Weight Builder: Pat Burns John Jaeckel- Player: Bob Probert Builder: Rocky Wirtz Adam French- Player: Adam Foote Builder: Gary Bettman Peter Tessier- Player: Peter Forsberg Builder: Pat Quinn Jan Levine- Player: Dominik Hasek Builder: Mike Keenan Tony Dean- Player: Mike Modano Builder: Brian Burke Colin Dambrauskus- Player: Mike Vernon Builder: Mike Rodgers
I want you guys to notice certain guys were not nominated such as Mark Recchi and Eric Lindros. This is something that the HHOF Selection Committee goes through as each person has their own “guy… who they believe should be an Honoured Member. Thus sometimes what the fans and media believe are sure fire candidates may not necessarily be the case. Also in this situation I want to point out that an Official was nominated by Scoop in Kerry Fraser. This means in our voting, no more than one Builder and one official can get nominated. This makes it much harder for a Builder to get into the Hall of Fame as if the vote is split between two candidates, they both will not get in. This may have been the case in 2011 and 2012 when there were no Builders Inducted into the Hall of Fame.
After this step we moved on to our vote. The HHOF Selection Committee would have done a secret ballot for this vote. In an effort to show transparency, I don’t intend on doing that. With this vote I had each member of our Committee vote for 5 people. I told them to keep in mind that up to 4 players can be Inducted and only 1 builder and 1 official. Sadly, Colin had to go on vacation before the voting so I asked a former HB blogger and Bruins blogger, Jesse Connolly to step in and vote for him. These are the results that have come in:
Adam Kirshenblatt: Mike Modano, Dominik Hasek, Peter Forsberg, Carl Brewer, Don Cherry Scoop Cooper: Mike Modano, Peter Forsberg, Gary Roberts, Kerry Fraser, Pat Burns Adam French: Mike Modano, Dominik Hasek, Peter Forsberg, Kerry Fraser, Pat Burns Mike Augello: Mike Modano, Dominik Hasek, Peter Forsberg, Curtis Joseph, Pat Burns Bill Meltzer: Mike Modano, Dominik Hasek, Peter Forsberg, Doug Weight, Pat Burns Tony Dean: Mike Modano, Dominik Hasek, Peter Forsberg, Doug Weight, Brian Burke John Jaeckel: Mike Modano, Dominik Hasek, Peter Forsberg, Bob Probert, Rocky Wirtz Jan Levine: Mike Modano, Dominik Hasek, Peter Forsberg, Gary Roberts, Pat Burns Jesse Connoly (via Colin Dambrauskus): Mike Modano, Dominik Hasek, Peter Forsberg, Curtis Joseph, Pat Burns Peter Tessier: Mike Modano, Dominik Hasek, Peter Forsberg, Pat Burns
As you guys can see, everyone voted for Modano and Forsberg, while only Scoop didn’t vote for Hasek. This means, Modano, Forsberg, and Hasek got more than 70% of the vote, making them Selected in our Hall of Fame. After that, Doug Weight, Gary Roberts and Curtis Joseph each had two votes, not enough to get in. Guys like Carl Brewer and Bob Probert were each voted for the guys who nominated them which wasn’t enough for them. On the Builders’ side of the equation, Pat Burns received 7 votes, just enough to be elected in this HB version of the Hall of Fame Committee. After that Don Cherry, Brian Burke, and Rocky Wirtz each got a vote. Kerry Fraser was the only Official nominated and he got a respectable 3 votes.
Therefore according to this Committee, your 2014 HHOF Inductees are:
Mike Modano Dominik Hasek Peter Forsberg Pat Burns
So the question is, what did we learn from this? The main thing here is that the Selection Committee is only limited to the players that were nominated. Each member of the Committee may think that there is more than one player worthy of consideration, but they are only allowed to nominate 1. This means some people can be left off. In our case, the main notables who were left off were Eric Lindros, Mark Recchi and Chris Osgood (as well as many more). Sometimes it just depends on the year for certain guys to have a shot. After the Committee nominates their candidates, there’s no going outside of that pool of people.
Another thing I wanted to harp on is the fact that it is 4 times harder to get into the Hall of Fame as a Builder or Official than it is as a Player. If there is no Official nominated, then up to 2 Builders can be Inducted on any given year, and vice-versa if there are no Builders nominated, than up to two Officials can be Inducted. Most of the time, however, both categories will have at least one nomination. This means the group of 19 Selection Committee members must have a 75% on one of them in order to get in. As we saw with the players, each member of the Hockeybuzz Committee had their own guy who they wanted in, thus the only real contender that came out of it was Pat Burns who barely got in with 7 votes. In the past Hockey Hall of Fame Inductions, there was no Builder in 2011 and 2012. This tells me that the vote was likely split between multiple nominations. Last year, in 2013, we saw Fred Shero get into the Hall of Fame as a Builder. He likely was one of the nominations from previous year that couldn’t get enough votes. We’ll see if his Induction last year clears the way for someone else to get in this year.
I want to thank everyone involved for cooperating with me during this process. I also want to apologize to them for pestering them to get their nominations and votes in. So thank you to Bill Meltzer, Scoop Cooper, Colin Dambrauskus, Peter Tessier, Mike Augello, Adam French, Jan Levine, Tony Dean, John Jaeckel, and Jesse Connoley, for giving me your input. As well thank you to Chris Wassel of “The Hockey Writers… and John Saquella for your advice to me for this project.
Hopefully we’ll get to do this again next year and we’ll be a little closer to the way the HHOF does it. Tomorrow, the Hockey Hall of Fame will announce their Inductees and we can compare and contrast on the similarities and differences that we may have had. Obviously they will not go into the details of their Induction but we may be able to infer some things based on what they do.
Feel free to comment here on HB, send me an email at adam.kirshenblatt@hockeybuzz.com or follow me on Twitter @Kirshenblatt. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------