So the Flyers nightmare season has come to an end. While teams that didn’t make the dance are turning their head to the end of season awards and the draft, I want to look even farther into the future to ask a question that every Flyers fan has asked once or twice in their lives. Is captain Claude Giroux a Hall of Famer?
As I said, I’m not the first person to ask this question, but in my quest to answer it I have found myself pouring over data and statistics, courtesy of Hockey Reference (whoever runs this site should be knighted), to try and do the impossible. And that is finding out some way to quantify what makes a hall of famer, and then apply that to Claude Giroux.
Unlike a sport like baseball, hockey doesn’t have a single aspect that draws a hard line between what does and doesn’t make a Hall of Fame caliber player. Even hockey reference’s version of baseball win shares, dubbed Point Shares, is incredibly inconsistent among current Hall of Famers.
Think 1000 points is your golden number? Not quite. Several players have eclipsed the 1000 point mark and not made it in, with some players even being snubbed north of 1200. On the other side, a handful of forwards like Paul Kariya and Eric Lindros have found their ways into the hall with point totals below the 1000 point mark, albeit barely in Kariya’s case.
So that’s my problem. How do you know what does or doesn’t make a Hall of Famer? Well, I have no idea. Ultimately what makes a Hall of Famer is that the members of the selection committee say that you are. Still, with a little bit of math, a little bit of elbow grease, and a whole lot of guesswork I think I can generally approximate what qualifies someone to make the cut. For simplicity’s sake, I am going to narrow it down to three general categories: The Numbers, The Hardware, and The Impact. So enough setup, let’s get into it.