Welcome to RANKED. Every week during the NHL season, we will be ranking players, moments, and anything else we can think of throughout hockey history. This week, we’re looking at eligible candidates to be a part of the 2024 Hockey Hall of Fame induction class. Who is the most deserving, and who might squeak through?
The goaltender-heavy 2023 class for the Hockey Hall of Fame has collected their rings, snapped their photos, and been enshrined among the sport’s greatest.
Now, hockey fans are set to renew debates once again for several months as the selection committee determines who will be part of next year’s group heading into the Hall. There are several first-year eligible players with strong cases, as well as returning players finally positioned to get their chance.
To determine how deserving each player is to be a Hall-of-Famer, we need to turn to ranking them on their candidacies.
The boom from Shea Weber’s huge hits and hard slapshots can still be heard in Nashville. The defenseman has not officially retired yet given that his contract is still on the Arizona Coyotes’ cap sheet, but his career is more or less done. This will be the first time Weber is eligible for the honor of being immortalized among hockey’s greats, but it might just be too early.
Weber never won a Norris Trophy and never won a Stanley Cup, so those two empty spots in his trophy cabinet will be meaningful when it comes to voting him into the Hall. His bevy of All-Star appearances over his 16-year career while playing for several good teams help his case, but they may not be enough for him to get in the first time around.
12. Curtis Joseph
Joseph’s candidacy has been hotly debated as to whether he deserves to be in the Hockey Hall of Fame or not. No one can deny his longevity as an NHL netminder for 19 seasons, and boasting some of the best statistical goaltending seasons of the 1990s with the St. Louis Blues. Despite that, there is still hesitancy to allow a player that fizzled out so dramatically towards the end of their career.
If Joseph had sustained the production from the first half of his career into the second half, there would be no question, but there was a peak, and then an incredibly long valley that saw Joseph hop around between some bad teams. The only award he lays claim to is the King Clancy in 2000, which also hurts his case.
One of the more underrated players of his era — though one that Detroit Red Wings fans won’t let you forget about — is Henrik Zetterberg. This is the third year the two-way center has been eligible, and he certainly has some of the qualifications necessary.
Zetterberg was nearly a point per game player over his 1,082-game career, winning the Conn Smythe in 2008 with the Red Wings, and is one of the few members of the Triple Gold Club, having won the Stanley Cup and earning gold medals at the Olympics and World Championship.
The knock on him is that there may just be too many players of his ilk above him in priority. They might not have had the same accomplishments (or the perfect beard), but there are forwards whose reputation is generally stronger than Zetterberg’s. He might get in, eventually.
Ilya Kovalchuk’s case is a weird one. His career fizzled out more than anyone else on this list, with completely forgettable stints in Los Angeles, Montreal, and Washington, before wrapping up his career in the KHL.
Kovalchuk was also a star player on a lot of terrible Thrashers and Devils teams, but between 2001-2013, nobody scored more than his 417 goals in 816 games, only Alex Ovechkin had more goals per game. That’s 11 seasons that there was practically a 50/50 chance as to whether he would score a goal or not in any game.
The main issue with Kovalchuk is the accolades or lack thereof. Even though scored heaps of goals, he won the Rocket Richard Trophy just once and never won a Stanley Cup. For some, he’s truly on the cusp of very good player or elite player deserving of enshrinement.
Luckily, it’s his first year of eligibility, so we can be confident that since there’s some doubt, he isn’t a top contender.
9. Keith Tkachuk
Keith Tkachuk is the model of consistency. He was never the league’s best at something – other than scoring the most goals in the 1996-97 season – but he was just consistently one of the better players on his team.
Throughout his 18-year career, Tkachuk amassed 538 goals. Only 33 players in NHL history have scored more goals all-time, and every single retired player on that list is in the Hockey Hall of Fame. That is the strongest argument Tkachuk has going for him, but he also never won an individual award and never lifted the Cup, walking away with World Cup gold in 1996 and Olympic silver in 2002.
It only makes sense to compare the two goaltenders on this list, though with Miller ranked higher than Joseph, we should perhaps expect some nasty emails from Maple Leafs fans who lived through the peak of the heated Toronto-Buffalo rivalry when Miller was between the pipes.
Unlike Joseph, Miller has won a Vezina Trophy as the NHL’s top goaltender, and arguably had a higher peak. From 2008 to 2012, Miller appeared invincible. On a particularly mediocre set of Buffalo Sabres teams, he was third in wins (182) and fourth in save percentage (.919). Famously, he also earned a silver medal with Team USA during the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver and won tournament MVP.
The major component working against him for next year is that it will be his first year of eligibility, and it’s difficult to argue that his career is quite up to snuff for that lofty honor.
7. Rod Brind’Amour
Brind’Amour’s worthiness of induction into the Hall has been a contentious topic over the last few years. He has the ring, has two Selke trophies, and has the pedigree of a player who played 20 years in the NHL. He was the most important player at times on the teams he was a part of, and now as a head coach of a very good Hurricanes team, he’s well-regarded around the league to help curry favor.
Whether or not someone thinks Brind’Amour is deserving of being a Hall-of-Famer is centered around the divide between people who want to keep the Hall of Fame to a small collection of the very best, or adding very-good-not-great players in.
6. Jennifer Botterill
In 2009, the Hockey Hall of Fame tried to take strides to regularly include women’s hockey players by “establishing a new voting procedure that allowed for an annual limit applicable to female candidates given the consensus among the Board that female candidates ought not to compete with male candidates for limited places of Honoured Membership.” Essentially, they wanted to designate specific spots for women to be inducted, instead of having to compete for spots with the men.
While a good idea in theory, in practice, there have been just 10 female inductees, and with the limit of two women’s hockey players each year, they have only used both slots once, way back in the very first year of the rule’s existence with legends Cammi Granato and Angela James being inducted at the same time.
All this is to say that the fact that Jennifer Botterill is in her 10th year of eligibility and is not in yet is astonishing.
Botterill won Olympic gold with Team Canada in 2002, 2006, and 2010, and has earned multiple IIHF World Championships, while also earning tournament MVP twice. She dominated college hockey to a seemingly impossible standard — a ludicrous 319 points in 113 games for Harvard — and dominated the Canadian Women’s Hockey League in the early 2000s.
She should be a lock, by now.
5. Meghan Duggan
Another lock for the Hall, and someone who should have been inducted as soon as she was eligible, is Meghan Duggan. The American forward captained Team U.S.A. to Olympic gold in 2018 and has a total of seven World Championship gold medals, along with a pair of Olympic silver medals. She was also one of the best women’s hockey players on the planet during his time at Wisconsin, where she won three national titles.
Professionally, she was able to win one Clarkson Cup in the CWHL with Boston before hanging up her skates. Now, she serves as the Director of Player Development for the New Jersey Devils, just to add an exclamation point to her lengthy resume.
With spots available, there really is no reason Botterill or Duggan should not be inducted as part of the 2024 class.
Gonchar had the misfortune of being a top-tier defenseman in an era with some of the best blueliners to ever play the game. Names like Nicklas Lidstrom, Chris Pronger, Scott Stevens, Rob Blake, Sergei Zubov, and Scott Niedermayer all shared the ice with Gonchar and have been inducted into the Hall of Fame before the Russian defenseman.
Because of this, Chelyabinsk native never won an individual award during his 20-year career in the NHL. He did win a Stanley Cup with the Penguins in 2009, and was an All-Star multiple times, but was never crowned the best during any season, despite four top-five Norris finishes.
Gonchar’s exceptional offensive abilities, with 811 points in 1301 games played, make him the 17th-highest-scoring defenseman ever, and all but one eligible blueliner ahead of him is already in the Hall. To put it into even more perspective, only Lidstrom had more points as a defenseman during his era.
Plainly, one of the best defensemen in a rough-and-tumble era should get in eventually. He’s already been eligible for seven years!
Patrick Marleau should probably get in during the first year of his eligibility, right? While some players’ peaks are much higher, Marleau played the incredibly long game and famously sits atop the NHL mountain with 1,779 games played. No one has seen more NHL action in the century-plus history of the league, which should arguably get him in alone.
In fact, that perch may just have to do exactly that. Marleau has never won an individual award, and the highest he ever finished in voting for a major trophy was ninth in Hart Trophy voting back in 2010. Marleau never won a Stanley Cup or any scoring titles and was arguably never even the best player on his team at any point. His pure longevity to an elite level will nevertheless be the calling card that earns him his spot.
The Magician. One of the greatest two-way centers to ever lace up his skates. A two-time Stanley Cup champion and a player that defined one of the most entertaining eras of the NHL. Pavel Datsyuk is near the top of this list for a reason.
Almost every hockey fan’s first move to convert any non-believer is to head over to YouTube and type in Datsyuk’s name. What he did with the puck in all three zones should never be forgotten. The goals he scored, the passes made, the pure terror he caused opposing players, even if they had the puck themselves, was a thing of beauty.
As far as accolades, he is the owner of two Stanley Cup rings, is a three-time Selke Trophy winner, four-time Lady Byng Trophy winner, and was officially named one of the 100 greatest players ever by the NHL itself. He scored a dazzling 918 points in 953 games and was arguably better defensively than he was offensively.
In his first year of eligibility, as it often was on the ice, it will be very tough to deny Datsyuk.
1. Alex Mogilny
Alex Mogilny’s role in hockey history deserves its moment. Aside from his Stanley Cup ring, the more than point-per-game career over almost 1,000 games, his Triple Gold Club status, and the oozing style he had on the ice, Mogilny is a trailblazer.
In 1989, Mogilny became the first ever Soviet player to defect to North America, bursting through the Iron Curtain and eventually going on to shine for the Buffalo Sabres. Because of Mogilny’s bravery, more overseas veterans eventually joined the league — perhaps most famously The Russian Five in Detroit — but it was the Sabres’ star youngster at just 20 years old that turned the tide.
Mogilny should be celebrated for not just making the NHL more of an international league, but for the fact that he was essentially a kid when he did so. Thanks to him, hockey and the NHL grew and became even more competitive as the best players funneled toward the top league. That alone should earn him commemoration from the Hall, but he was also one heck of a player and has all the accolades a player needs for acknowledgment. Mogilny being passed over an astonishing 14 times for the Hall of Fame is nothing short of criminal.
