As a note, this is a Red Wings blog. Suck it.
When the Hockey Hall of Fame welcomes their newest class of inductees, that list will include four absolutely great hockey players in Joe Sakic, Adam Oates, Pavel Bure, and Mats Sundin. All four are deserving of this honor and let me take nothing away from their careers by saying that this is bullshit.
Brendan Shanahan was as good a hockey player and leader as any of these guys (ok, probably not Sakic, but Brendan Shanahan also wasn’t an Avalanche, so he was better than Sakic too just by virtue of that). Shanny was left out of the voting class by means we’ll never fully know aside from two clues:
1. 75% of the selection committee didn’t think Shanahan deserved to get into the Hall
OR
2. Brendan Shanahan didn’t get more votes than the other four guys who DID get enough
So we’ll rage about this for a couple of days, or a year, or forever. We’ll rage because this is stupid and you should rage about stupid things. We’ll argue (completely correctly) that Brendan Shanahan was way more deserving of a Hall of Fame nomination than Mats Sundin and some will lose sight of how wrong that is.
Mats Sundin deserves to be in the Hall of Fame because Mats Sundin was awesome. It’s dumb that there’s an arbitrary limit on nominations every year and that anybody should be made to wait a single year or a Burnscentennial to get in. If there are six deserving guys in a year, then six guys should get in.
Sure, there’s an argument about how the comparisons are necessary to make sure you’re only getting the best of the best from a certain era and making sure you’re not watering down the Hall of Fame. That argument is stupid. I have been to the Hall of Fame and not one second while walking around did I ever think “man, there are just too many people here. Hockey sucks because they have too many good people deserving to be recognized forever for their awesomeness.”
Greatness should be rewarded, not funneled through some horrible bureaucratic bullshit.
