The Hockey Hall of Fame Class of 2019 was announced Tuesday, and this year’s inductees are Hayley Wickenheiser, Guy Carbonneau, Sergei Zubov, and Vaclav Nedomansky as players, and Jim Rutherford and Jerry York in the builders category. Here’s a little bit about each of them and their careers.
- Hayley Wickenheiser
Wickenheiser was the first woman to break the gender barrier in hockey as a player when she played for HC Salamat in the Suomi-sarja men’s league, which is the third highest league in Finland. She was also the first woman to record a point and/or score a goal in a professional men’s hockey league. Before that, she had declined an offer from Phil Esposito to play in the ECHL for the Cincinnati Cyclones. She was more than capable of playing against men, and the main reason she went to Finland instead of the ECHL was that the European game is more wide-open and less physical than the North American game, which is what she wanted. She is widely considered to be the greatest female hockey player of all time, or at least one them, and is now a first-ballot Hall of Famer who is more than deserving of the honor. She played for the Canadian women’s national team for 23 years (1994-2017), winning four Olympic gold medals and one silver as well as seven gold and six silver IIHF World Championship medals. She was also named tournament MVP at the 2002 and 2006 Winter Olympics. She made her first appearance for Team Canada at just 15 years, four months old at the 1994 World Championships in Lake Placid, New York, and is the youngest player to do so. She served as the captain of the team on numerous occasions and finished her career as the team’s all-time points leader, with 168 goals and 211 assists in 276 games. She is heavily involved in the community and is widely respected by the entire hockey community. She has received more awards and honors than I could possibly list here, including being named to the Order of Canada in 2011. She retired on January 13th, 2017 at the age of 37, and is now in med school with the intention of being a doctor (fun fact: she was taking an exam during the HHOF media call and couldn’t be a part of it because she would’ve failed if she used her phone). She will be the sixth woman to be inducted into the Hall of Fame.
2. Guy Carbonneau
Carbonneau played for the Montreal Canadiens for 13 seasons and was then traded to the St. Louis Blues before the start of the 1994-95 season. He played one season for them before being traded to the Dallas Stars at the beginning of the 1995-96 season. In total, he played 18 seasons in the NHL before retiring at the end of the 1999-2000 season with the Stars. He won three Stanley Cups in his career, two with the Canadiens and one with the Stars, and ranks sixth on the all-time postseason games played list having played 231 career playoff games. He was an excellent defensive forward who was also good offensively, ending his career with 260 goals and 403 assists in 1,318 games. He blocked shots at a time where few did, was great at the faceoff dot, and was willing to take a beating along the boards or in front of the net. Some people don’t think that he should be inducted into the Hall because his point total wasn’t great given how many games he played, but I disagree. He is a prime example of how point totals don’t mean everything and that you can still be a Hall of Fame worthy forward even if you don’t have incredible offensive numbers. He certainly deserves to have his name forever enshrined in the Hall, and not just on the Cup.
3. Sergei Zubov
Zubov spent the first three seasons of his NHL career with the New York Rangers before being traded to the Pittsburgh Penguins at the beginning of the 1995-96 season. After that year, he was traded to Dallas, where he spent 12 seasons before retiring at the end of the 2008-09 season. He ended his career with 152 goals and 619 assists in 1068 games across 16 seasons. He also added 24 goals and 93 assists in 164 career playoff games. These are impressive numbers given he was a defenseman playing in the heart of the dead puck era, and there were very few others with his numbers. He won two Stanley Cups, one with the Rangers and one with the Stars, and he played heavy minutes for every team he played for through the end of his career. Yet until now, he was often overlooked when talking about players who should be in the Hall of Fame. This is likely due to the fact that he mainly played in a smaller market in Dallas, as his numbers were pretty comparable to those of Scott Niedermayer, and there is no one denying Niedermayer deserves his spot in the Hall of Fame. Regardless of how he was looked at before, it is nice to see Zubov finally getting the recognition he deserves, as he certainly had a Hall of Fame-worthy career.
4. Vaclav Nedomansky
Nedomansky is best known as the first player to defect to North America to play hockey, doing so in 1974. He wouldn’t be allowed to return to his native Czechoslovakia (very close to what is now the border of Slovakia) until after the fall of communism in 1989. He played for six different teams over his 22 season professional career. He spent the first 12 seasons of his playing career with Slovan Bratislava of the Czech league, but not all of his stats from his time with the team are known, so I won’t list them here. He was also an indispensable member of the Czech national team, playing in two Olympics and on 10 World Championship teams, including the one that won gold in 1972. His stats are also mostly unavailable from his time there, so again I won’t be listing them. When he defected to Toronto via Switzerland in 1974, he joined the Toronto Toros of the WHA, where he would spend two seasons, racking up 97 goals and 82 assists in 159 games. He won the Paul Deneau Award, given to the most gentlemanly player, at the end of the 1975-76 season as a member of the Toros. He then played for the Birmingham Bulls of the WHA for one full season and part of another one, scoring 38 goals and adding 36 assists in 93 games for them. He transferred to the NHL partially through the 1977-78 season, becoming a member of the Detroit Red Wings. He spent five seasons with the team, scoring 108 goals and adding 139 assists in 364 games. He then split the 1982-83 season between the New York Rangers and the St. Louis Blues, racking up 14 goals and 17 assists in 57 games for them. He retired at the end of that season at the age of 39. While he didn’t have a decorated NHL career, it was largely due to the fact that he didn’t start playing in the league until he was 32 and past his prime. He deserves to be in the Hall of Fame given he played and produced well in the NHL even though he was past his prime and because of his importance to the Czech national team. Also, he was a pioneer in the sport as he was the first player to defect to North America and he paved the way for countless others to do so.
5. Jim Rutherford
Rutherford is being inducted into the Hall under the builders’ category after spending the past five seasons as the GM of the Pittsburgh Penguins. He led the Penguins to back-to-back Stanley Cups in 2016 and 2017 after spending 20 years with the Carolina Hurricanes/Hartford Whalers organization as president and GM. He led the Hurricanes to the franchise’s first Stanley Cup in 2006. He began his work in the front office with the Windsor Spitfires of the OHL, and he led them to an OHL championship in 1988 and a chance at the Memorial Cup because of it. Before he began his front office work, he enjoyed a 13-year NHL career as a goaltender. He was drafted tenth overall by the Detroit Red Wings in 1969 and played for them and the Toronto Maple Leafs, Los Angeles Kings, and the Penguins over his career. He spent three seasons with the Penguins as a goalie near the beginning of his career and it was the statistically-best segment of his career as he had a 0.899 SV% and a 3.14 GAA over those three years. Over his whole NHL career, he had a 0.879 SV% and 3.66 GAA. Rutherford has been involved in the game for a long time and has made a huge impact in his time as GM of the Penguins and also did well in his time with the Hurricanes/Whalers, and is well deserving of his nomination to the Hall of Fame in the builders’ category because of it.
6. Jerry York
Like Rutherford, York is being inducted into the Hall as a builder, and deservingly so. He is the all-time winningest coach in NCAA hockey history with 1,067 career wins, and has been coaching at his alma mater, Boston College, for the past 26 seasons. He also played center for BC while he was in school there. He has been a head coach for 48 seasons total between BC, Clarkson University, and Bowling Green University, and has won five national championships, one with Bowling Green and four with BC. When he took over the BC Eagles in 1994, they were floundering, but by his fourth season there, he had guided them to the Frozen Four. This started an incredible run of theirs that included 12 Frozen Four appearances in 18 years, including the four national championships I mentioned earlier. He was the Spencer Prose Award winner as national coach of the year in 1977 and won the Lester Patrick Trophy for outstanding service to the sport in the United States in 2010. It is rare for NCAA coaches to be inducted into the Hall of Fame (only four others have been, and those ones were mainly inducted for reasons beyond their NCAA careers), but there is no question York is more than deserving of this incredible honor.
Hockey Addict 