Last summer, shortly after the Hockey Hall of Fame announced its inductees for 2008, I wrote a column decrying the omission of former Toronto Maple Leafs’ captain Doug Gilmour. Like most opinions published in a newspaper, mine engendered both positive and negative reactions; and, since the topic was hockey, Canadian passions ran high on both sides.
As always, I am thankful to those who took my side and I admire their perspicacity. Among those who disagreed with me, however, objections fit into two major categories: Some supposed that my complaint was born of a Toronto-centric view of Canada’s national winter sport, as though any captain of the Leafs should, ipso facto, be granted entry to the Hall in his dotage (I don’t believe this, actually, although the annual snubbing of Wendel Clark, as well as Gilmour, remains a travesty). Others, meanwhile, wondered about my credentials to opine on hockey matters (I am, after all, an investment advisor), and this latter point is my detractors’ strongest.
In short, I am no more qualified than any of the millions of other Canadian ankle-burners who, as the advertisement says, “have driven an hour for 19 minutes of ice time.” That said, having braved decades of early winter mornings for the sake of a few shifts, I am no less qualified than they are, either.
But as to Gilmour and his claims to fame, I note that no critic took issue with the substance of my case. To wit, this man scored a point a game over 20 NHL seasons with seven different teams. As I wrote last summer: “For a year or so during the 1993-94 season, he was touted in many quarters as the best hockey player in the world. Was there one day, or even a single game, when the same was said of Anderson or Larionov [two players admitted to the Hall in 2008]? Moreover, Gilmour's career included captaincies of two Original Six teams (Toronto and Chicago), a Stanley Cup, a Canada Cup and the Selke Trophy as the NHL's best defensive forward.”
Speaking of that Stanley Cup, Gilmour was the only player to score a Cup-winning goal against the Canadiens in the Montreal Forum, leading the Calgary Flames to victory in 1989 (anything Toronto-centric about that?).
As the Hockey Hall of Fame prepares to vote on its inductees for 2009, it looks to be a bottleneck, with only four spots available and such superstars as Steve Yzerman, Brett Hull, Luc Robitaille, Alexander Mogilny and Brian Leetch eligible for the first time. The funny thing is, with the exception of Yzerman, Gilmour outscored every one of them.
Yes, that is correct: Doug Gilmour scored more career points than Brett Hull, one of the deadliest snipers in hockey history, or Alexander Mogilny, one of only eight players to score over 70 goals in a season (quick – name the others), and he did so while setting the gold standard for a back-checking forward. Granted, Leetch was a defenceman who managed to rack up over 1,000 points on the blue line while winning a Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP with the 1994 New York Rangers, but the point is not to run down these astounding players, it is to highlight Gilmour’s overlooked greatness.
With that in mind, as the Hall of Fame’s Selection Committee convenes on June 23, they should allocate this year’s four available spots to Yzerman, Gilmour, Leetch and Hull. If it seems unreasonable that superstars like Robitaille and Mogilny should be passed over in their first year of eligibility, along with perennial outsiders like Clark, Kirk Muller and Claude Lemieux, that’s because it is. But fame, like hockey, is a tough game.
theo@halfgreat.com
Theo Caldwell is the author of Finn the half-Great.
