Hall of Fame Standards for the Challenge Era

Today we're going to wrap up our look at the Inductinator, which is a system I devised to determine implicit standards for Hall of Fame player selections. Well, not quite wrap up, since I should make some comment about European and female players, which I will at some point. But let's stick to the things we can mostly explain for now. In Hockey Abstract 2014, I discuss at some length the results from 1930 to the present, both to shed light on history and to make predictions of future inductions. I've already covered the period 1912 to 1929 here on Hockey Historysis. And now we look at the years up to 1911.

This time period, which I'll call the Challenge Era, calls for a somewhat different approach than more recent times. There are no individual awards or All-Star teams to draw information from. Player career statistics are all but useless, in large part because careers were so much shorter in the 19th century, so that comparisons between early professional players in the oughts and senior players before 1900 are not terribly informative.

As it turns out, we don't really need all that, because we have the Stanley Cup. Take note that of all the Hall of Fame players who played before 1911, none of them began their careers before the 1892/93 season, the first that the Stanley Cup was awarded. The best pre-Stanley Cup players such as Tom Paton, Allan Cameron, James Stewart and Jack Campbell have not been honoured. For the 25 Hall of Famers from this era, approximately 60% of their total Inductinator scores is made up of Stanley Cup-related exploits.

Of the 26 Hall of Famers from this era (see below), only five did not win a Stanley Cup championship. So we start by giving skaters 10 points for each Cup championship, and goaltenders 25 per title. Captains of Stanley Cup teams get extra points; players who captained one such team (such as Graham Drinkwater and Tommy Phillips) get 10 points, and each additional Cup captaincy earns a whopping 70 points apiece. Mike Grant, Dickie Boon and Bruce Stuart were captains twice each, while Harvey Pulford was three times, which is enough by itself to get him over the minimum score of 100 for the Inductinator to see the player as being a Hall-of-Famer.

I should say at this point that for this era, the number of Cup championships a player has is not as straightforward as it is for later players. During the challenge era, there were often multiple Cup series played in a single season. The current champion could be called upon by the trustees to defend their title several times in the same season, even sometimes in the middle of a season. In 1908, for example, the Montreal Wanderers had to defend against challenges from the Ottawa Victorias in January, and both the Winnipeg Maple Leafs and Toronto HC in March. For purposes of the Inductinator, we do not count a successful defence of an existing title to be a Stanley Cup championship; it's only when a new champion results from a series that it's counted. The Wanderers don't get credit for three Cup championships for 1908, they get one.

Players winning the Cup with multiple teams get a bonus of 40 points. While this may not seem to sensible, there's not other way to explain how Tom Hooper is in the Hall of Fame. Bruce Stuart, Tommy Phillips and Fred Scanlan also get these points, but they'd have enough points otherwise to still meet the implicit standards. Cecil Blachford also won Cups with two teams, but these points aren't enough to get him to 100. Which is good, since he's not in the Hall of Fame.

Games played, and especially goals scored, in Stanley Cup matches contribute a lot of points the to the Challenge Era Inductinator. Players earn points if they participated in 10 or more Cup matches, and goaltenders earn more per game (since there's so little else to go on for them). A player who did not play in a single Stanley Cup match suffers a penalty of 20 points; otherwise, there would be no way to explain how Herb Jordan is not in the Hall.

But in terms of Challenge Era players being recognized by the Hall of Fame, it seems nothing is as important as scoring goals in Stanley Cup matches. Of the Inductinator scores for the Hall of Famers, a full 26% is earned by Stanley Cup goals alone. Every single player from this era that scored at least 14 goals in Stanley Cup matches is in the Hall of Fame. Fred Whitcroft, who did not play very much top-level hockey but scored 14 goals in eight Cup matches, is in. He gets 100 points for his Stanley Cup goals. He has to, since he did nothing else of note in his hockey career, and we want to explain his induction. Frank McGee scored 41 goals in Cup games, and that explains why he's on the top of the list below.

But wait, you might be aware that Frank "Pud" Glass won a bunch of Stanley Cups with the Wanderers, including one as captain, and scored 13 goals in those games. So how do we explain his exclusion from the Hall? Simple; we consider goals per game as well. Glass took 11 games to score his goals (1.18 per game), while Whitcroft (for example) scored 14 in eight (1.75 per game). Since Glass scored at a subpar rate (for a Hall-of-Famer, anyway), his total goals aren't valued as highly.

Other points are earned for having reasonably lengthy senior careers (important for Hod Stuart and Blair Russel), for playing with one team for at least nine years (again, important for Blair Russel), and for finishing in the top four in goals for a top-level league, or the top two in goals for a lower-level league. Russell Bowie makes out like a bandit in this last category, earning 380 of his 409 points here. He lead a top-tier league in goals five times, was second four times and third once. No one else comes close to that level of production in the Challenge Era.

Finally, we get to the more arbitrary stuff. Tragic deaths are treated favourably by the Hall of Fame. George Richardson was killed in WWI, and although this was after his playing career was done it seems he was more fondly remembered because of it, since otherwise we would not be able explain his induction in this analysis. Hod Stuart's death was all the more noteworthy, as he died in mid-career and as a Stanley Cup champion. Almost all of his Inductinator score (80 out of 102) is derived from this.

All of this so far can be used to explain 22 of the 26 Hall-of-Famers from this era. We're left with Graham Drinkwater, Billy Gilmour, Jack Ruttan and Oliver Seibert.

With Gilmour, one suspects that the true reason he was inducted is that at McGill he played with Frank Patrick, whose brother Lester was of course extremely influential at the time as a member of the selection committee. His Cup wins and goals give him 50 points, so we need another 50. We can attribute that to personal connections and give up, or we can look for something else he might have been famous for. Well, he is one of the very few sets of three brothers who each won a Stanley Cup, and he did it with his brothers (dave and Suddy) on the same team. So, we can give him 40 points for that feat, and an extra 10 for winning the most Cups amongst his set of brothers. It's not the worst thing to recognize such a thing, I suppose, if in fact that's what was being recognized by the committee.

Drinkwater is 40 points short. The only thing I could find to set him apart was the fact that he was one of the three original Allan Cup trustees in 1909, well after his playing career was over. If I were on the committee, I wouldn't assign any player value to this, and maybe they didn't. But it's the only thing I can think of to get him over 100 points. The two other trustees were Dr. H.B. Yates and Sir Edward Clouston. Clouston might also be eligible to collect these points. He never played for the Stanley Cup, of course, since he was 44 years old by the time that mug was first awarded. But Clouston was one of the "Original 18", the 18 men who played in the hockey match at the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal on March 3, 1875. Clouston played with James Creighton's side, who won that match two goals to one.

Just to make sure we're not being completely arbitrary here, we should also check the original Stanley Cup trustees, to see if they would be put over 100 with this bonus. The two original Stanley Cup trustees were John Sweetland and Philip Ross. Sweetland played no high-level hockey that I'm aware of, but Ross did. He played for McGill in 1879, and later in Ottawa for the famous Rideau Rebels in 1890 and the Ottawa Generals (later the Senators) in 1891. But he never played for the Stanley Cup, so even if we gave him the same 40 points we give Drinkwater, he still wouldn't be over 100 on the Inductinator scale, so we're safe.

The induction of Jack Ruttan, I'll tell you right now, cannot be explained by the Inductinator. He played five seasons of senior hockey in Manitoba in the early 1910s, and won the Allan Cup in 1913. He was very well-regarded as a player in Manitoba, but his accomplishments do not outshine dozens of other players who are nowhere near the Hall. He's a complete and total question mark. I can't explain him, not even close.

Finally, Oliver Siebert. He was certainly a good player. He gains 45 points for leading a lesser league (Western Ontario League) in goals, but loses 20 for never having scored a Stanley Cup goal, for a total of 25. We need another 75 points. Now, there is something that sets Siebert apart from other players, which I suppose we can assign a value of 75 points, although doing so is incredibly silly. That this is this: he has a son (in Earl Seibert) who is a Hall of Fame-calibre player. Oliver was inducted in 1961, and Earl in 1963. We can technically use this to get the elder Seibert over 100 points, though I feel a bit dirty doing so. I suppose such a thing would increase a player's fame, since that's a pretty vague term. I did check other players as well, to make sure such a bonus would not any non-Hall-of-Famers over 100. The closest is goaltender Bert Lindsay, who played after the Challenge Era. Being Ted Lindsay's father is not enough to get him over the threshold, so we can award this bonus to Seibert without producing undesirable results.

Player	Pos	HoF?	Score
Frank McGee	F	yes	416
Russell Bowie	F	yes	409
Bruce Stuart	F	yes	350
Tommy Phillips	F	yes	332
Harvey Pulford	D	yes	272
Marty Walsh	F	yes	250
Harry Westwick	F	yes	231
Alf Smith	F	yes	226
Harry Trihey	F	yes	224
Dan Bain	F	yes	172
Riley Hern	G	yes	167
Fred Scanlan	F	yes	159
Mike Grant	D	yes	122
Tom Hooper	D	yes	105
Graham Drinkwater	D	yes	102
Hod Stuart	D	yes	102
George Richardson	F	yes	101
Bouse Hutton	G	yes	100
Blair Russel	F	yes	100
Dickie Boon	D	yes	100
Billy McGimsie	F	yes	100
Fred Whitcroft	F	yes	100
Art Farrell	F	yes	100
Oliver Seibert	F	yes	100
Billy Gilmour	F	yes	100
Bill Nicholson	G	no	99
Herb Jordan	F	no	99
Pud Glass	F	no	97
Archie Hooper	F	no	96
Billy Breen	F	no	96
Lorne Campbell	F	no	92
Cecil Blachford	F	no	90
Fred Higginbotham	D	no	90
Suddy Gilmour	F	no	89
Rod Flett	D	no	87
Gordon Lewis	G	no	87
Billy Roxburgh	F	no	82
Eddie Geroux	G	no	79
Herb Birmingham	F	no	76
Art Brown	G	no	74
James McKenna	G	no	74
George McKay	F	no	74
Tony Gingras	F	no	73
Robert MacDougall	F	no	73
Oren Frood	F	no	72
Bruce Ridpath	F	no	68
Clare McKerrow	F	no	66
Ezra Dumart	F	no	65
Jack Ruttan	D	yes	0

You can see that, by these standards, there are a number of other players who could just as easily be in the Hall of Fame. Bill Nicholson, Herb Jordan, Pud Glass, Archie Hooper, Billy Breen are all extremely close, and several others are over 90 points as well. Would we view these players any differently today if they had a few more breaks and were elected to the Hall of Fame? Perhaps, but we really shouldn't. The Inductinator analysis reveals that some Hall of Fame selections from this early era seems almost arbitrary, so I cannot recommend putting too much weight on the honour.

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

This year's new edition of the Hockey Abstract includes a lengthy chapter on the Inductinator, which is a system I devised to determine implicit standards for the Hall of Fame, trying to figure out why each Hall of Fame player was selected as such. It may not be that the best or most deserving players are inducted according to your personal standards or indeed mine, but the Inductinator proceeds with the assumption that the Hall of Fame Selection Committee acts in a reasonably rational manner, and has a reason for each of its selections, even if the justification for using such a reason might be weak.

Last time we had a look at goaltenders and defencemen who played in what I call the Major-League Era, specifically the years 1912 to 1929 when the Stanley Cup became the domain of only a top few hockey leagues. Today we'll be looking at the forwards from this era. Remember that the system is designed so that every player with an Inductinator score of 100 or more meets the implicit Hall of Fame standards.

For most players, the criteria are pretty straightforward. If we look at the top man as an example, Newsy Lalonde. He earns 22 points for the senior-level hockey games he played in excess of 200, and another 42 points for the points he scored in excess of that number. He earns 67 points for his senior career points-per-game average; anyone in excess of 0.95 gets points for this, up to a maximum of 70. Lalonde receives 43 points for his 19 seasons of senior hockey; 14 is the minimum number to earn any points in this category. Newsy earns a ridiculous number of points for his top-four finishes in major-league scoring. He led a major league in scoring three times, was second once, third once and fourth four time, resulting in 112 points. Only Joe Malone (with four) and Fred Taylor (with five) led a major league in scoring more often during this period. Lalonde also served as a player-coach in the major leagues for nine seasons, and earns 60 points for that, giving him a total of 346. He was also head coach in the NHL for seven seasons after his playing career was over, but only those players with at least nine such seasons earn any points for it. It may seem odd to reward a player for something that happened after his playing career, but without this category there would be no way to explain Jack Adams' induction into the player category in 1959.

This isn't the only post-career accomplishment that has to be considered in this era to explain some player selections. You might notice Conn Smythe on the list below, with 60 points on the scale despite playing literally only a handful of senior games. All of these points come from the fact that he was the coach of a Canadian Olympic hockey team (in 1928). Without this massive amount of points, you could not explain Frank Rankin's induction; he was the coach of the 1924 team. Ranking was quite a good player, but had a very short career. His high career points-per-game gives him 47 points, and the other 60 come from the Olympics. It's even worse in the case of Steamer Maxwell, who is recognized as the coach of the 1920 Olympic team, and receives 100 points on the Inductinator scale for this. You can explain the extra 40 points either because he was the first Olympic coach, or because he had a longer senior career than Rankin or Smythe. Once again, Maxwell was a good player in his day, though he never played professionally. He was an extremely fast rover, but he used his speed largely in defence, and never scored very much. He's nowhere near the Hall of Fame purely as a player.

There are some other kludgy work-arounds needed in this era, awarding a large amount of points to a player for an accomplishment that would not seem to be worth that much at first glance. Shorty Green is probably the best example. Based on his playing career alone, his Inductinator score would be precisely zero. He was a decent player, but nothing special. There are two things for which he might be renowned, both of which arise from his captaincy of the 1924/25 Hamilton Tigers. This was the first (and to date, only) NHL club that went from worst to first in the span of a single season. Green was also the leader of the Hamilton player strike before the 1925 playoffs, which earned them a good deal of fame. So we can assign arbitrary values to these events, and give Short Green 50 points for each of them to get to the Hall. It's not terribly satisfying, but it works.

Rusty Crawford is another one. Based purely on his career numbers, despite his very long career Crawford would score only a 50. The only thing that sticks out about him at all, that other players cannot match, is the range of his major-league career. He is the only player from this, so far as I can tell, to have played for a major-league team in every Canadian province that had such a team (British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Québec). He played for the Vancouver Maroons, Calgary Tigers, Saskatoon Crescents, Toronto Arenas, Ottawa Senators and Quebec Bulldogs in his career. I can't find anyone else who meets this criteria. Newsy Lalonde missed out Alrberta and Tommy Dunderdale didn't play in Ontario. They're Hall of Famers nonetheless. Art Gagne and Eddie Oatman both also hit four provinces, but not five; Gagne missed BC and Oatman, Saskatchewan. So if we give Crawford 50 points for this feat, his induction makes sense.

Rewinding a bit, there are a number of things that Newsy Lalonde missed out on for Inductinator points. Players who won at least three Stanley Cup championships earn points for the feat, while Lalonde had only one. Captaining a Stanley Cup championship, and scoring a Cup-winning goal also garner points. Playing and scoring goals in the Olympics are also rewarded, as are Allan Cup accomplishments. The Hart and Byng awards are also valuable, though they arrived relatively late in this time period.

As you can see from the table below, there are a number of players who could just as easily be Hall-of-Famers as not. Bernie Morris, Corb Denneny, Harry Smith and Dubbie Kerr are all only a few points off of the 100 threshold. Personally I would have put each of these men in before Rusty Crawford among others, but the Inductinator is not about merit, about who should be in the Hall of Fame. It's about explaining who is in the Hall. It's an attempt to shed some light on history, not to call down the efforts of the selection committee.

We'll finish up our look at the Inductinator next week, when we examine the Hall-of-Fame players from the Challenge Era, up to 1911.

FORWARD	HoF	SCORE	GP	G	A	PTS	PIM
Newsy Lalonde	yes	346	344	443	94	537	806
Joe Malone	yes	277	278	345	73	418	221
Fred Taylor	yes	242	206	218	110	328	219
Frank Nighbor	yes	231	438	255	119	374	324
Didier Pitre	yes	231	344	313	79	392	457
Cy Denneny	yes	177	398	310	90	400	450
Dick Irvin	yes	160	324	367	93	460	409
Ernie Russell	yes	151	100	176	16	192	299
Duke Keats	yes	150	301	234	117	351	764
Frank Fredrickson	yes	145	366	246	112	358	499
Harry Broadbent	yes	141	385	224	63	287	829
Frank Foyston	yes	140	367	255	82	337	206
Tommy Dunderdale	yes	140	302	260	74	334	609
Mickey MacKay	yes	138	422	274	118	392	334
Jack Walker	yes	138	444	262	99	361	129
Hobey Baker	yes	130	41	65	33	98	2
Billy Burch	yes	127	412	166	73	239	255
Jimmy Gardner	yes	120	169	90	29	119	431
Frank Rankin	yes	107	21	63	0	63	0
Scotty Davidson	yes	107	49	52	18	70	150
Harry Watson	yes	106	60	94	20	114	2
Gord Roberts	yes	106	171	207	44	251	325
Tommy Smith	yes	105	213	365	33	398	359
Jack Darragh	yes	104	258	208	73	281	355
George Hay	yes	102	410	208	118	326	145
Jack Adams	yes	102	297	249	56	305	518
Babe Dye	yes	101	281	216	48	264	221
Moose Goheen	yes	101	143	65	15	80	0
Barney Stanley	yes	101	265	190	94	284	257
Steamer Maxwell	yes	100	37	20	12	32	63
Shorty Green	yes	100	126	75	18	93	183
Rusty Crawford	yes	100	303	165	69	234	435
Harry Hyland	yes	100	155	192	34	226	398
Bernie Morris	no	99	237	202	83	285	139
Corb Denneny	no	98	350	225	72	297	365
Harry Smith	no	92	112	246	8	254	229
Dubbie Kerr	no	91	166	191	45	236	340
Eddie Oatman	no	85	320	198	101	299	456
Tony Conroy	no	84	186	54	14	68	80
Art Gagne	no	82	395	179	90	269	434
Louis Berlinguette	no	80	346	92	57	149	304
Odie Cleghorn	no	77	299	231	65	296	444
Herb Drury	no	72	294	59	16	75	205
Cully Wilson	no	65	355	204	85	289	814
Fred Harris	no	61	282	175	81	256	449
Conn Smythe	no	60	5	2	0	2	0
Bert McCaffrey	no	52	321	103	49	152	202
Jack McDonald	no	34	244	195	59	254	179
Carson Cooper	no	33	341	215	74	289	97
Ty Arbour	no	31	370	137	69	206	184
Don Smith	no	27	189	189	27	216	359
Billy Boucher	no	25	252	116	41	157	442
Sibby Nichols	no	21	99	102	27	129	150
Harry Meeking	no	17	274	106	41	147	330
Charley Tobin	no	14	201	154	39	193	139
Jimmy Herbert	no	11	238	89	33	122	255
Ken Mallen	no	10	182	182	27	209	277
Harry Scott	no	9	123	178	7	185	182
Alf Skinner	no	9	257	117	32	149	432
Carl Kendall	no	8	67	33	19	52	52
Skene Ronan	no	5	138	108	25	133	244

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

Hockey Abstract 2014 - Out Now!

One project I've been working on this summer is contributing to a new edition of Rob Vollman's Hockey Abstract. I've known Rob for a very long time, since early on in the internet hockey analytics days when I was publishing research on Puckerings.com. He wrote and published the first edition of the Abstract last year. This year, he recruited me and another long-time chum of ours, Tom Awad (of GVT fame) to contribute to it. We're very excited to be able to work on a project like this together after all these years, and I think we've put together a very solid product.

Hockey Abstract 2014 is primarily devoted to the analysis of current players and teams, of course. However, my main contribution to the book is a thorough discussion of the players in the Hall of Fame. The Inductinator was a tool I developed at Hockey Prospectus, designed to predict future Hall-of-Fame inductees based on data from the modern (post-expansion) players who were already in the Hall. It was an attempt to discover implicit Hall-of-Fame standards; it is meant to predict who will be honoured, not necessarily who should be. Anyone with a score of 100 or more on the Inductinator is expected to be a Hall-of-Famer, with higher scores having shorter waiting times than lower scores.

For the Abstract, I first refined my model based on recent Hall of Fame inductions, but being me I wasn't happy just discussing the present and future, I wanted to go back in time as well. So I extended the Inductinator all the way back to 1930, when the NHL adopted essentially modern offside rules. Although I was initially skeptical that I would be able to do so, ultimately I was actually able to develop implicit standards for all players back to 1930 such that every player who is in the Hall of Fame scores at least 100, while every player who is not scores at most 99. So the Inductinator actually performs two functions: not only are we able to predict future Hall-of-Famers with it, but we can shed some light on past Hall-of-Famers as well, to see what the selection committee has apparently considered to be important in selecting players.

Although in the Abstract I only take the analysis back to 1930, I have also extended the Inductinator back to the beginning of the first hockey league in Canada, in 1886. I have not been able to achieve a 100% success rate at isolating Hall-of-Famers from the other players before 1930, however there are only a few exceptions. Next week I will be posting some discussion of early Hall-of-Famers so you can see what I mean.

In the meantime, please have a look at the 2014 edition of Hockey Abstract. I don't think you'll be disappointed. It's available in both print and PDF formats.