The Athletic’s 2024 Hockey Hall of Fame committee: Who we elected and how it happened

Next Tuesday, the Hockey Hall of Fame selection committee meets to choose its class of 2024 and if their meeting is anything like ours, there will be fireworks. Here at The Athletic, we began a project four years ago in which we convene a “shadow” selection committee, mirroring the actions of the 18-member real-life HHOF selection committee. As closely as possible, we follow the Hall of Fame’s actual protocols, which require a successful candidate to get 14 “yes” votes to gain election.

It’s not an easy threshold to reach. If you were to win a political election with 67 percent of the popular vote, that would be considered a landslide victory. But in HHOF balloting, 67 percent translates to only 12 yes votes, which leaves you two short of the magic number of 14 needed.

The 2024 election is especially intriguing in the male player category. The most prominent player eligible may also be the biggest lightning rod. That’s Pavel Datsyuk, the long-time Detroit Red Wings star who played 16 NHL seasons and in 953 regular-season games, scored 314 goals and 614 assists. Datsyuk won seven major NHL trophies – three Selkes and four Lady Byngs – plus two Stanley Cups. Internationally, Datsyuk is also a member of the Triple Gold Club.

After completing his NHL career, Datsyuk returned to Russia and played the final five seasons of his career in the KHL, winning the Gagarin Cup in 2017. His credentials smack first-ballot Hall of Fame.

What complicates matters is what’s been described in hockey circles as the Russia Factor. Currently, the International Ice Hockey Federation has banned both Russia and Belarus from international competition, as a protest against the war against Ukraine.

The last Russian player elected to the Hall of Fame was Sergei Zubov in 2019. Several worthy candidates from Russia who’ve been eligible for years – including Alex Mogilny and Sergei Gonchar – were passed over again by the selection committee last year. What impact will the Russia Factor have on Datsyuk’s candidacy?

Our panel this year consisted of Arpon Basu, Hailey Salvian, Jeremy Rutherford, Mark Lazerus, Max Bultman, Rob Rossi, Sean Gentille, Sean McIndoe, Dom Luszczyszyn, Shayna Goldman, Scott Wheeler, Julian McKenzie, Kevin Kurz, Jonas Siegel, Daniel Nugent-Bowman, Ian Mendes, Ian Denomme, plus me, as the chair.

The election took place in three stages: Male player category, female player category and builder.

By rule, up to four male players, two female players and two builders can be elected each year. Committee members are permitted to nominate two people (one in the player category, male or female, but not both) and one builder.

This year, our committee nominated 19 individuals: 11 male players, three female players and five builders. We held the meeting on Tuesday this week. Here’s how it unfolded.

Male player category

Nominees in alphabetical order: Pavel Datsyuk, Sergei Gonchar, Curtis Joseph, John LeClair, Patrick Marleau, Brad McCrimmon, Alex Mogilny, Ziggy Palffy, Tim Thomas, Keith Tkachuk, Shea Weber.

In all, there were three Russians nominated: Datsyuk, Mogilny and Gonchar. In every previous iteration of this exercise, our shadow committee has elected Mogilny, though we have to keep coming back to him because the real committee has kept him out.

Our Detroit correspondent, Max Bultman, began by arguing that Datsyuk should be assessed on the merits of his achievements on the ice.

“What I remember most about him is his freakish hands and hockey sense,” Bultman said. “He played in a low-scoring era, so his numbers are deceptively low. If you look at the whole decade in what I would call his prime – 2003 to 2013 – he’s sixth-leading scorer in the league for that decade… Given all of his accolades and defensive awareness, you have possibly a top-five and certainly a top-10 player of his generation.

“The committee’s been hesitant about Russian players during the war in Ukraine, but our job is to pick the most deserving hockey players for the Hall and I would have a really hard time seeing a Hall of Fame that doesn’t have Pavel Datsyuk in it.”

It’s worth noting here than in every Hall of Fame discussion, there tend to be tiers of candidates – beginning at the top with the automatics and then moving down to the borderline.

Though Datsyuk isn’t necessarily automatic, the full weight of his career jumps off the page far more than any other first-year 2024 candidate.

However, the exercise is all about debate and discussion and a couple of our panelists did frame the counterargument against Datsyuk.

One said, “I think we should consider the political climate. This is a guy who went back to Russia to finish his career and he’s doing these charity things with Putin and that sits wrong with me… Considering the climate we’re living in, I have a hard time voting for him right now.”

After a back-and-forth about how letting politics into the equation could send the committee down a slippery slope, one voter summarized the Datsyuk discussion this way:

“Unless I’m missing something, I’m not aware of Mogilny ever having dipped into politics in any serious way. And I do think there’s a difference between saying, ‘We’re not going to elect anyone from an entire country because anything that country has done covers everyone who carries that passport’ versus saying, ‘If somebody actively supported something (wrong) and we give them the opportunity to do so again, do we give them that platform?’ Especially, when there is a long list of other worthy candidates to consider. Maybe we kick the can down the road a bit on this candidate until things look brighter politically.”

From Datsyuk, we moved efficiently through the list. Two other players eligible for the first time – Marleau and Weber – received a fair bit of discussion. Marleau is the NHL’s all-time games played leader, passing Gordie Howe in the final year of his career, but his most noteworthy contributions center around longevity and team play. Rarely was he ever even the best player on his own team, and never among the best in the league.

Weber, meanwhile, was lauded for his all-around game: Strong defensively, gifted offensively, a player with a lethal slapshot. Arpon Basu noted that Weber had a presence, an aura, that made opponents shrink from him – a quality that’s real in a body contact sport, though sometimes hard to quantify.

Remember, to be successfully elected a candidate needed 14 out of a possible 18 votes.

The results of the first ballot were as follows:

Mogilny and Datsyuk cleared the bar. The bottom six candidates (LeClair, Marleau, McCrimmon, Palffy, Thomas and Tkachuk) were dropped from consideration and a second ballot, featuring three names – Weber, Joseph and Gonchar – was circulated.

The results of that ballot:

As the low vote-getter, Gonchar was dropped. At this point, the third (and final) ballot was distributed. Two names remained – Weber and Joseph. Committee members were instructed to vote for both, for one, or neither. The results:

Surprise!

Each player came up one agonizing vote short. The general response to the result fell somewhere between shock and disbelief.

I asked both Basu, who nominated Weber, and Sean McIndoe, who nominated Joseph, for their reactions.

From Basu: “I’ve got to admit, I didn’t think this would be all that difficult. Weber’s case is easily justifiable by the numbers alone; he is the top goal scorer among defensemen over his 16-year career. But the intangibles, him being among the top defenders in the game over that time, being widely considered as one of the top leaders in the game over that time, being one of the most respected players in the game over that time, made him a slam dunk candidate to me.

“The fact he came up a vote short makes me wonder if I took too much of that for granted in my pitch (though it is appropriate considering Weber finished second for the Norris Trophy twice in his career by the slimmest of margins each time). I pointed all these things out, of course, but maybe I wasn’t passionate enough in my pitch, thinking the facts would be enough, or that my colleagues were sharp enough to make the right call here on their own. I won’t make that mistake again.

“I get there’s a high bar for being a first-ballot Hall of Famer. It’s a category unto itself. And maybe an argument can be made that Weber doesn’t quite reach that bar. All I know is my argument that he did indeed reach that bar apparently came up a bit short, and I suppose that’s on me. That’s also given me a sense of how much pressure the actual committee members must feel when they are making the argument for someone who should be a lock for the Hall of Fame.”

From McIndoe: “Oof. I’m not sure which would feel worse, getting next-to-zero support for a candidate, or getting 13 votes in a system that draws an all-or-nothing line at 14. I’m second-guessing my pitch now, wondering if there was one more stat or comparable that I could have thrown at the group to make the difference.

“To make matters worse, if this were the real-world committee, nobody would ever know that Joseph came so close. And maybe he has. Maybe he’s been stuck at 13 for years now, and nobody has any idea. Or maybe he hasn’t even been discussed. None of us outside of that room know, and that’s a problem.

“Either way, am I bitter? No, of course not. Am I going to spend the next week figuring out which five of my co-workers voted against Joseph, and plotting my revenge at the Vegas draft? Absolutely.”

Jennifer Botterill is a three-time Olympic gold medalist. (Robert Laberge / Getty Images)

Female player category

Nominees in alphabetical order: Jennifer Botterill, Meghan Duggan, Shannon Szabados.

Split votes can be an issue in the HHOF process and in the female player category, there was a danger that could happen. All three candidates – Botterill, Duggan and Szabados – had strong cases.

Botterill, according to Daniel Nugent-Bowman, “ Is perpetually on the short list of the best women’s players not in the Hockey Hall of Fame. It’s time to change that. Botterill is the only two-time winner of the Patty Kazmaier Award. She is often regarded as the collegiate circuit’s all-time leading scorer even if she’s not officially recognized as such because women’s hockey wasn’t an NCAA-sanctioned sport in her first two seasons. There’s a record-setting 10-point game on her resume, too.

“On the international stage, Botterill is one of only two players to be named MVP twice at the women’s world championship. The other person who can match her there is the still-active Hilary Knight. Speaking of the worlds, Botterill had 59 points in 40 career games at that tournament – 1.48 points per game. No HHOF-eligible player can equal that proficiency. Botterill is also a four-time Olympian – and three-time gold medalist – and led the Canadian Women’s Hockey League in scoring in its inaugural season (2007-08).”

Duggan also has a long list of achievements – on and off the ice as outlined by Hailey Salvian. Off the ice, she led the U.S. women’s team protest against USA Hockey for better compensation, a battle that they ultimately won. On the ice, she captained the U.S. women to the Olympic gold medal in 2018, after winning silver in 2010 and 2014. She played in eight world championships and won seven gold medals in that time. She was a collegiate star at Wisconsin and the 2011 Patty Kazmaier winner.

As for Szabados, nominated by Shayna Goldman, she won two Olympic golds for Canada in 2010 and 2014 and silver in 2018 and along the way, broke barriers for women’s players. Szabados played multiple times in multiple leagues against male players and succeeded. Perhaps most noteworthy, in 2013-14, she played in the Southern Professional Hockey League, where she became the first female goalie to win an SPHL game and the next year, became the first female goalie to record a shutout in a men’s professional hockey league game. Kim St. Pierre is already in the Hall; many believe Szabados was arguably at least her equal and possibly the greatest female goalie of all time.

With three strong candidates, but only two spots available, here’s how the vote went:

As you can see, it was tight – so tight that none of the three achieved the necessary 14 votes to gain admission on the first ballot. Per rule, the lowest vote-getter (Duggan) was dropped and a second, final ballot was distributed featuring two names, Botterill and Szabados. Voters could choose both, just one, or neither. Both cleared the threshold the second time and were elected.

Builder category

Nominees in alphabetical order: Francois Allaire, Jacques Demers, Mark Johnson, Eddie Johnston, Fran Rider

Five builders were nominated, all of whom impacted hockey positively on some level. Francois Allaire, as a ground-breaking goalie coach. Jacques Demers as a successful NHL coach who later acknowledged publicly that he was functionally illiterate during the time he was working. Mark Johnson, whose father, Bob, is already in the Hall as a builder, is arguably the most successful coach in women’s hockey history thanks to his work at the University of Wisconsin. Eddie Johnston was a long-time NHL player and executive, most notably as the GM who drafted Mario Lemieux and helped stabilize a floundering Pittsburgh Penguins’ franchise. And Fran Rider was a key figure in building grassroots hockey programs for women and girls and helped organize the first-ever women’s world championship. Up to two builders can be elected each year.

Our first ballot went this way:

Rider cleared the bar right away (after falling one vote short in a previous iteration of this exercise).

We then distributed a second ballot and dropped the two lowest vote-getters from the list and asked our committee to select one from the remaining candidates, Johnson and Allaire. Ultimately, neither achieved the necessary 14 votes.

Accordingly, for 2024, only Rider was elected in the builder category. A stick tap to Nugent-Bowman who achieved a rare feat. Of the five people elected this year, he nominated two.

Here’s part of his pitch for Rider: “Rider has been a driving force behind the sport’s growth for decades. She helped found the Ontario Women’s Hockey Association. She relentlessly organized the first women’s world tournament, which served as a precursor to the inaugural world championship a few years later. She pushed to get women’s hockey into the Olympics. She continues to try to make hockey better for girls and women of all ages and skill levels. No one is more fitting to be the first woman to be inducted in the builder category than Rider.”

That concluded our deliberations, with five elected to the Hall. Two in the male category (Mogilny and Datsyuk). Two in the female category (Botterill and Szabados) and one builder (Rider).

I asked some of our panelists for final thoughts on the process and Rob Rossi offered this observation:

“What strikes me about this process is how subjective it is — even if you try to be objective. I feel there are built-in biases, which was expected, but I will say that several pitches had me closer to voting in favor of candidates I was a ‘No’ on going in. And I suppose that is a good thing.

“NHL Awards played no factor in my decisions, and that won’t change. I’m an NHL Awards voter, and I know too much about how that process works to give winners or finalists an edge in something like the Hall of Fame. I do struggle with how to evaluate skaters and goalies from the Dead Puck Era (1997-2004). I worry deserving candidates from that period will not make the Hall of Fame as we get further away from it.”

Stay tuned to see what the real committee comes up with Tuesday.

(Top photo of Pavel Datsyuk: Bill Wippert / NHLI via Getty Images)