The Athletic’s Eric Duhatschek answered reader questions in a mailbag feature today, and his answer as to whether Pavel Datsyuk is a Hockey Hall of Fame player is…weird:
How do you think the Hockey Hall of Fame selection committee will handle Pavel Datsyuk next year in his first year of eligibility with the controversy around Russian players? With Mogilny, he’s been left out for so long it’s more of the same, but Datsyuk was generally thought to be a first-ballot lock. —Rory S.
I haven’t served on the selection committee for five years now, so I have no idea what the discussion was like this year when it came to a pair of Russian-born players, Alex Mogilny and/or Sergei Gonchar, who were thought to have reasonably good chances of making the grade in 2023 and didn’t. Was there a tacit fear that electing Russian players amid the war in Ukraine would reflect badly on the Hall? Hard to know. Selection committee chairman Mike Gartner, when interviewed on TSN after the selections were announced, carefully sidestepped a question about snubs or players who didn’t make the cut by saying that just because someone isn’t elected to the Hall of Fame one year doesn’t mean they won’t eventually become a Hall of Famer. Was that just a generic boilerplate observation, or can we read into that, that they were careful treading around Russian players? As for Datsyuk’s candidacy, he won four Lady Byngs, three Selkes, two Stanley Cups, appeared in five Olympics on behalf of Russia and scored 918 points in 951 NHL games. That’s a Hall of Fame resume. The debate or discussion will be: Is he a first-ballot choice or not? A few others who seemed like easy first-ballot choices – Joe Nieuwendyk and Dale Hawerchuk, for example – weren’t elected until their second years of eligibility. So there is a precedent to maybe push back Datsyuk a year.
Continued; yeah, war in Russia or no war in Russia, I don’t understand why you’d “push back Datsyuk.”
