Hall of Fame Standards for the Major-League Era (Part One)

Any longtime fan of hockey knows that the identity of the players in the Hockey Hall of Fame, and of the players who have not been inducted, can be a source of great debate among the faithful. Almost everyone has a favoured played they really feel deserve the honour, and can name several players already in the Hall that probably shouldn't be there, especially not ahead of their preferred hockeyist. These disagreements arise not only because of the selection committee's opaqueness when it comes to the selection process, but also because there are obviously no objective standards as to who should be a Hall-of-Famer and who should not. You cannot look at a player's career, add up all his awards and accomplishments, compare the total to a chart, and arrive at a “yes” or “no” answer. It's just not that simple.

However, even though there are no objective standards, we can try to figure out whether the Hall of Fame selection committee has any implicit standards; that is, standards that can be determined based on who has been inducted into the Hall of Fame, and just as importantly who has not, in a sort of reverse engineering of the selection standards. Such a system could be used to discuss past selections, but perhaps more interestingly it could also be used to predict future inductees based on the career records of active or recently-retired players. So, can we examine the career statistical records of Hall-of-Famers and non-Hall-of-Famers, and come up with a formula that represents the basis the selection committee apparently used to select the players for the honour?

As it turns out, we can derive these standards, and we call the resulting system the Inductinator. The Inductinator calculates a score for every hockey player, and any player who achieves a score of 100 or more meets the implicit standards of the Hall of Fame selection committee. It's important to remember that this system is not concerned with who should or should not be in the Hockey Hall of Fame, but rather to determine whether there are any set of standards that the selection committee could have used for the honourees. It's descriptive rather than prescriptive; it does not deal with what should be, but what is.

The Inductinator results for players whose careers were primarily after 1930 make up the bulk of my contribution to Hockey Abstract 2014, available now. Here at Hockey Historysis, I'm going to take it back even further, and today we're going to look at the Inductinator for players whose careers primarily spanned 1912 to 1929, which I refer to the as the "major-league era" here, since it was the first time that competition for the the Stanley Cup was restricted to the major professional league or leagues (NHA, NHL, PCHA, WCHL and WHL).

Like later eras, the system addresses forwards, defencemen and goaltenders separately. Later eras are generally easier, because of greater consistency in the statistics (since top players only played in one league for the most part) and because of the existence of annual individual awards. So while I was able to arrive at implicit standards that perfectly discriminate between Hall-of-Famers and non-Hall-of-Famers for 1930 and beyond, it's to be expected that earlier eras are more difficult. And indeed, there are some players from this era that I am not able to statistically make a Hall-of-Famer without also elevating dozens of other players who have not been honoured to the minimum score of 100. But it's actually only three players that I cannot account for, although a couple of others require something of a cheat to get them in, as we'll see. Just like in the Hockey Abstract, I'm going to go position-by-position, starting in goal.


Hall of Fame Standards for Major-League Era Goaltenders
 
As it turns out, the goaltenders for this era are really, really easy to develop implicit standards for. So easy, in fact, that there is an almost limitless number of ways in which you could do it. Also, you could do it with a single one of a number of statistics.

For example, as you can see below, for goaltenders who played primarily in this era, there are only five netminders who played at least 333 top-level games, and they're all in the Hall of Fame. So you could say that any goalie who played at least 11 major-league seasons is a Hall-of-Famer. You could even say that any goalie who won a Stanley Cup as a starter is a Hall-of-Famer. There are other goalies who won a Cup in the years 1912 to 1929, however their careers were primarily after this era, and so are not included in this group.

Of course I did not want to use any of these simplistic ideas for the Inductinator, so I put together something that seemed reasonable, considering not only the Hall-of-Famers but other goalies as well. I'll use Georges Vezina to illustrate. Vezina played 15 seasons of top-level hockey; he gets seven points for each of those seasons beyond the eighth, for 49 points. He gets 40 points for winning at least one Stanley Cup as a starter, and since he had at least one win for every two games played, he earned points there as well. He receives one point for each .001 that his winning percentage (wins divided by games played) exceeds .460, for 67 points. He died tragically in mid-career, and the Hall of Fame loves that kind of thing, so he gets 40 points for that as well. He also gets the maximum 30 points for his career games played. This brings his total to 226, well above the 100 minimum and more than any other netminder of the era. Note that for career statistics, for seasons before 1926/27 we consider professional stats, and after that season NHL stats only.

The only thing Vezina misses out on is points for his GAA relative to league average. He had a career GAA of 3.40, which the league average for the seasons in which he played was 3.41. He would have received points if his GAA was .90 of the league average or less. Alec Connell, for instance, meets the Inductinator standard with his GAA alone, earning 114 points that way. It should be noted that while Percy LeSueur and especially Paddy Moran look bad by GAA, they played largely in earlier times than the others, when scoring was much higher. For the first half of Moran's career, he played in leagues that featured more than six goals per game.

GOALTENDER	HoF	SCORE	GP	W	GAA
Georges Vezina	yes	226	328	173	3.41
Alec Connell	yes	205	417	193	1.91
Clint Benedict	yes	203	440	239	2.44
Hugh Lehman	yes	181	422	220	3.29
Percy LeSueur	yes	178	170	98	4.31
Hap Holmes	yes	140	409	198	2.81
Paddy Moran	yes	107	206	98	5.24
Hal Winkler	no	83	203	100	2.28
Bert Lindsay	no	64	150	66	5.37
Jake Forbes	no	26	210	85	2.76
Charles Stewart	no	18	77	30	2.45
Hec Fowler	no	17	186	83	3.64
Bill Laird	no	10	53	30	2.96

Hall of Fame Standards for Major-League Era Defencemen
 
Defencemen are a much more varied group than the goaltenders when it comes to Hall-of-Famers. There are 15 honoured defenders from this era, compared to five goaltenders. It is worth noting that  players are included in this era if they had even one full season after 1911. This is the only way we can make sense of the inclusion or exclusion of certain players.

Defencemen receive points from many things for their Inductinator score. Games played (adjusted to consider any seasons missed due to military service), points scored and points per game are all important. The number of senior seasons played, and the number played at the highest level are also considered. Stanley Cups won, and being the captain of a Stanley Cup champion are also very important. The number of years that the defenceman was a player-coach is included, and if he had a very long career as a coach after his playing days were over, he received some points for that. Players whose careers were ended early by injury or death have an adjustment for this fact.

Since Québec-born Francophone players and US-trained players were fairly rare in this time period, such players receive a bonus to their Inductinator scores. Without this adjustment, it would be extremely difficult to see how Jack Laviolette had a Hall-of-Fame career.

One player from this era that you might have wondered about is Gordon "Phat" Wilson, the great senior player for Port Arthur. Wilson never played professionally, and never played in the best senior leagues either. What he did do, and what it seems the Hall of Fame selection committee wished to reward, is be in the Allan Cup playdowns year in and year out. His teams qualified for the Allan Cup eight times and won the championship three times, and Wilson played 41 Allan Cup matches, scoring 29 points as a defenceman. No one else from this era can match these accomplishments, and as such it seems clear that Allan Cup play is what earned Phat Wilson his place in the Hall.

The only one that I simply cannot explain with any kind of implicit standards is George McNamara. Although he was a very famous player in his day, especially in conjunction with his brother Howard with whom he shared the moniker "Dynamite Twins" due to their powerful body-checking, there is nothing remarkable about his career. If anything, his brother Howard had the more impressive career, and yet it is George who is in the Hall of Fame. Here he scores a big fat zero on the Inductinator as a player, and I cannot provide any reason for him to have been inducted based on his days as a player.

The only thing that makes him stand out from his brother is that after his career, he was the coach of an Allan-Cup winning team, with Sault Ste. Marie in 1924. For some early players, the selection committee clearly did consider post-playing career accomplishments, as we will see. But it would be incredible to say that an Allan Cup championship as a coach for a former player would be worth, by itself, selection to the Hall of Fame. This was during probably the toughest era for the Allan Cup, since it was after a formal playoff system was instituted for the Allan Cup, and before the establishment of minor-league hockey which siphoned off so many quality senior players. Moreover, Eddie Carpenter, who scores at nine on the Inductinator for his playing career, was the coach of Port Arthur as they won two Allan Cups in 1925 and 1926. So if McNamara were to be enshrined for this accomplishment, surely Carpenter would have been as well. This strongly suggests tells us that this was not the implicit standard that McNamara benefited from. I gave both McNamara and Carpenter 20 points for this accomplishment, but that only puts George up to 20, though it does move him ahead of his brother who scores 17 based on his playing career.

McNamara's score of zero as a player led me to a deep search for anything that made him stand out. I decided to check newspaper reports from the time that he was selected for the Hall of Fame, and made what could turn out to be a rather startling discovery. I checked several different Canadian newspapers from April 28, 1958, and they all say the same thing when discussing the newly-elected members of the Hall of Fame for that year. Here is an example from the Regina Leader-Post:

"NEW NAMES

Those added were:

Builders. Senator Donat Raymond, Montreal; the late George McNamara, Toronto; George Dudley, Midland, Ont.; the late Jim Norris Sr., Detroit; Conn Smythe, Toronto; Al Pickard, Regina; and Lloyd Turner, Calgary.

Players with the teams they were most closely identified with. Frank Boucher, New York; Frank (King) Clancy, Ottawa and Toronto..."

George McNamara was listed as a builder, not as a player. Now, it remains entirely possible that the media was given erroneous information, and that McNamara was in fact supposed to be listed as a player. Indeed the Hockey Hall of Fame itself lists him as an Honoured Player. Frankly, his selection would make a great deal more sense in the builder category. A SIHR member related to me that McNamara contributed a substantial amount of cash toward the construction of the International Hockey Hall of Fame in Kingston, and that he was generally quite philanthropic after his playing career was done, so it would make a great deal more sense as a basis for his induction than what he did on the ice.

However, it seems that this is ultimately a red herring, that the player category is where McNamara was inducted. This was confirmed by a SIHR member via a contact at the Hall of Fame. But yet another SIHR member, Andrew Ross, actually blogged about the McNamara induction a few years ago. He noted that in a letter, Frank Selke Sr. (who was a member of the Hall of Fame selection committee) wrote that "when George was admitted [to the Hall] Howard's wife told a friend of mine that George could not carry Howard's skates. I asked [Art] Ross and Lester [Patrick] about this and they said, which one was Howard?"

So perhaps it was supposed to be Howard. He would certainly have been a better choice based on his playing career, but the Inductinator still would not have been able to justify it. The McNamaras were a bit larger than life, and perhaps their reputation was all that was needed. Regardless, the selection of George McNamara is surrounded by quite a bit of confusion.

Next time we will look at the forwards from this era.

DEFENCEMAN	HoF	SCORE	GP	G	A	PTS	PIM
Eddie Gerard	yes	249	250	170	76	246	325
George Boucher	yes	218	496	151	91	242	927
Sprague Cleghorn	yes	209	377	174	105	279	849
Lester Patrick	yes	206	227	169	71	240	187
Harry Cameron	yes	180	350	220	95	315	490
Reg Noble	yes	173	541	195	109	304	982
Art Ross	yes	164	185	98	34	132	563
Joe Hall	yes	141	240	159	40	199	913
Moose Johnson	yes	109	257	122	50	172	505
Herb Gardiner	yes	109	277	76	47	123	147
Jack Laviolette	yes	102	235	98	34	132	489
Joe Simpson	yes	100	397	127	76	203	274
Si Griffis	yes	100	149	83	43	126	181
Phat Wilson	yes	100	117	56	24	80	148
Bobby Rowe	no	99	291	123	56	179	567
Goldie Prodger	no	91	234	115	40	155	262
Frank Patrick	no	88	124	105	38	143	106
Clem Loughlin	no	80	383	80	44	124	342
Art Duncan	no	80	382	96	69	165	406
Lloyd Cook	no	74	231	114	59	173	210
Walter Smaill	no	68	140	101	35	136	231
Hamby Shore	no	67	189	121	31	152	566
Bert Corbeau	no	60	341	83	55	128	939
Billy Coutu	no	57	300	45	21	67	532
Percy Traub	no	51	318	32	34	66	551
Leo Reise	no	50	329	80	54	134	276
Duke Dukowski	no	42	356	66	48	114	424
Muzz Murray	no	42	126	44	4	52	69
Gord Fraser	no	30	279	63	31	94	495
Eddie Carpenter	no	29	192	52	12	64	330
Bobby Trapp	no	28	257	47	45	92	264
Harry Mummery	no	27	239	62	32	94	602
George McNamara	yes	20	139	37	17	54	291
Slim Halderson	no	19	218	62	44	106	318
Howard McNamara	no	17	152	54	20	74	456