As soon as the 2023 Hockey Hall of Fame class was announced Wednesday, I called former NHL goaltender Martin Biron and asked his thoughts. Biron played with Henrik Lundqvist in New York early in his career; broadcasts games in Buffalo, where Tom Barrasso won the Calder Trophy for NHL Rookie of the Year; and was just getting through the ranks when Patrick Roy and Mike Vernon delivered some epic duels on the ice.
Up until this year, goalkeepers were notoriously under-represented in the hall – only seven have been elected in the past 30 years, including one last year, Roberto Luongo. So when the seven-member Hall of Fame class was unveiled on Wednesday — and three netminders were elected — Biron, like many others, felt it was time to finally break the deadlock.
Lundqvist, Barrasso and Vernon were all part of a five-player, two-builder class designated by the HHOF. Pierre Turgeon and Caroline Ouellette were also selected in the Player category, while Ken Hitchcock and Pierre Lacroix made it in the Builder category.
“It was about time,” said Biron. “The number of goalkeepers has been very limited over the last 30 years and reserved for the greatest of the greatest. Part of the Hall of Fame is just that. Henrik Lundqvist, no doubt. He took the league by storm. He’s had seven straight 30-win seasons, and he could have had more. Had it not been for the 48-game schedule in the 2012-13 season, he probably would have picked up 12 straight games. I played with Hank in New York. He was incredible.
“Tom Barrasso resembled Hank in the way he took the league by storm, only he was 18 at the time. Talking to people who were on the team at the time here in Buffalo, Barrasso was spectacular. He was athletic. He would take risks. He played the puck like a defender. He was great. It took him a while to find success with the team, but he finally did in Pitt (Pittsburgh, where he won back-to-back Stanley Cups with the Penguins).
“If there were two goalkeepers at the top of my Hall of Fame list, it would have been Lundqvist and Barrasso.”
But Biron, who played 508 games in 16 NHL seasons and finished his career with a .910 save percentage, also lobbied for Vernon, who joined the NHL in 1985-86 the same year as Patrick Roy.
Vernon, who played for Calgary, lost to Roy’s Montreal Canadiens in the 1986 Stanley Cup Finals, but then reversed the script three years later and helped the Flames defeat the Canadiens in the Stanley Cup Finals. That year, Vernon could have been the winner of the Conn Smythe Trophy due to his strong play in the opening round win over the Vancouver Canucks, but he ended up narrowly losing to teammate Al MacInnis.
Vernon won the 1997 Conn Smythe Trophy when he won his second Stanley Cup championship with the Detroit Red Wings, a team that had to defeat Roy and the Colorado Avalanche to win it all. As for his career, Vernon won the straight fight against both Roy and the third goalie in the triumvirate of that era, Grant Fuhr. But since that era — roughly the mid-1980s to mid-1990s — was the highest scoring era in NHL history, the sheer raw numbers of all three weren’t spectacular compared to the goaltenders who played their early years in the dead puck era , which began around 1999. During the 1993 season, 15 NHL players scored 50 or more goals. A decade later, in 2003, only one (Milan Hedyuk) succeeded.
“I mean, if you look at the Flames’ success in the 1980s, it was about Mike Vernon,” Biron said. “He was small but so fast. Then he had a lot of success in Detroit as well. I got Vernon in the same conversation as Chris Osgood, Mike Richter, and Curtis Joseph. I like that they have three goalkeepers this year because I didn’t think that was going to happen. And I still think there are a lot of talented goalkeepers who aren’t doing so well.”
It is possible that this year’s course will open the door to some of the goalkeepers mentioned by Biron and even out some of the statistical imbalance between goalkeepers and positional players.
Since Billy Smith was elected in 1993, Fuhr in 2003, Roy in 2006, Ed Belfour in 2011, Dominik Hasek in 2014, Rogie Vachon in 2016 and Martin Brodeur were the other seven goaltenders in that three-decade period took office in 2018 and Luongo last year.
And if you look at it a decade earlier, from 1983 to 1992, only five other goalies were selected: Ken Dryden (1983), Gerry Cheevers (1985), Ed Giacomin (1987), Tony Esposito (1988) and Vladislav Tretiak (1989 ). .
A total of 294 players are currently anchored in the hall. Of these, 40 are goalkeepers (13.6 percent). They include Kim St.-Pierre, who entered the women’s player category in 2020, and Tretiak, who didn’t play in the NHL but had a long, successful career with the Russia national team.
Epoch-adjusted stats help explain the numbers, but Biron says it’s more important to consider how they compare to their peers.
“Curtis Joseph had to go up against Patrick Roy, Eddie Belfour, Dominik Hasek, Marty Brodeur — he had all these really good guys in front of him,” Biron said. “He was never a first or second-team All-Star and was a Vezina finalist (in 1999 he finished second to Hasek). And he doesn’t have the trophies.
“But I put a lot of emphasis on where were you compared to your peers? Vernon was one of the best against Roy and Fuhr. That’s why he deserves to be there. The same goes for Barrasso.”
Turgeon and Alexander Mogilny both played important parts of their careers in Buffalo. Biron remarked that he was “disappointed” that Mogilny was once again passed over. He had 990 points in 1,032 career games, netted 76 goals in the 1992-93 season, and paved the way for younger Russian players to enter the NHL after retiring in 1989.
“I know Pierre Turgeon – a great guy. i love pierre He’s great,” said Biron. “But Mogilny. When you talk about Hall of Famers, talk about how dominant they are over their peers. How much better were they at their best than everyone else? And Mogilny was that guy – not just in the NHL, but in international hockey as well. He has to go in, doesn’t he? It’s getting ridiculous.”
Biron noted that he starred in the year that Vachon was inducted into the Legends Hall of Fame after decades of waiting.
“I remember looking at Rogie’s stats and dominance for a while and yet it took forever for him to come in,” Biron said. “I was wondering how does one compare what Vachon has done to the players who are eligible now? It is difficult. If you wait too long for these goalkeepers, it becomes almost impossible to do so. A player is a player. If you score 76 goals, you can always put that in perspective. But a goalkeeper with the way the equipment has changed and the game has changed, it’s just so different when you compare the eras.”
Biron also wanted to bang the drum on behalf of Francois Allaire and Mitch Korn, two of the most influential goalkeeping coaches of all time.
“Francois and to some extent his brother Benoit had such a big influence on the goalkeeper with Patrick Roy and the butterfly style,” said Biron. “Or Mitch Korn. We call it the Goalie Tree by Mitch Korn. Check out any goalie or goalie trainer descended from the Korn goalie model. There is no category for them at the moment, but there should be. People who walk through the Hall of Fame should know the impact they’ve had on the game – and we don’t talk about them enough.”
(Photo by Henrik Lundqvist: Steven Ryan / Getty Images)