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Greg Wyshynski, ESPNNov 15, 2023, 07:00 AM ET
CloseGreg Wyshynski is ESPN’s senior NHL writer.
The Hockey Hall of Fame can welcome up to four men’s players in every annual class.
Based on how many current NHL players could be worthy of a plaque in Toronto — and how many qualified candidates are still waiting for the call — the Hall will not suffer from a lack of choices.
Here is a tiered ranking of active NHL players based on their current Hall of Fame cases. There are about a dozen locks, joining recently retired icons like Zdeno Chara, Patrice Bergeron and Duncan Keith in line for immortality. There are dozens more that are still building their cases, as well as veterans that are stuck between all-time greatness and “the Hall of Very Good.”
Let’s begin with the two players that have defined hockey this century:
Skip the wait (if they still did this)
Sidney Crosby
Alex Ovechkin
In 1999, Wayne Gretzky played his final game as a professional hockey player. Soon after, it was announced that the selection committee had made him the 10th player in NHL history to have the mandatory three-year waiting period for possible enshrinement waived. When you’re “The Great One,” the holder of dozens of scoring records and on your way to getting your No. 99 retired across the entire league, that made sense.
But the practice ended with Gretzky. The committee feared that they were creating a God-tier class of inductee by waiving the wait period for no reason other than on-ice accomplishment, for players like Gretzky and Bobby Orr. It was decided that the wait period would henceforth only get waived for “certain humanitarian circumstances.”
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If this special exception was still in effect, Crosby and Ovechkin are on that “best of the best” tier for their generation of players. Sid led the Pittsburgh Penguins to three Stanley Cup wins and scored the second most important goal in Canadian international hockey history (in 2010), winning multiple gold medals through the…
Source link : https://www.espn.com/nhl/insider/story/_/id/38896170/hockey-hall-fame-nhl-players-rankings-crosby-ovechkin
Author : Greg Wyshynski
Publish date : 2023-11-15 11:50:28
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