Hall of Fame debates are a staple of sports arguments - whether a player's amassed the credentials to be honored among the best in their sport is prime fodder for discussion over a beer. We're spotlighting a collection of players who we believe either deserve the distinction but haven't yet been inducted, or don't quite measure up but had a great impact on their franchise or sport.
The year was 1993, and Curtis Joseph was getting jobbed out of admittance to the Hockey Hall of Fame.
At the time, Joseph was a rising star in his fourth NHL season with the St. Louis Blues, and had gone to lengths to prove he could capably shoulder an immense workload. Over 68 games in 1992-93, he led the NHL in shots faced (2,202), saves (2,006), and save percentage (.911). Per Hockey-Reference, his 16.2 point shares - an estimate of team standings points for which a player can take credit - were most among goaltenders, a cut above Ed Belfour's 13.0. Not only did Joseph pace the league in goals saved above average; his total, 57.42, blew away Belfour's remarkable 39.36 and is still the best single-season GSAA mark since the mid-1970s.
Yet when Vezina Trophy votes were counted that spring, Joseph placed third in the tally, behind Belfour, then with the Chicago Blackhawks, and the Pittsburgh Penguins' Tom Barrasso.
The argument against inducting CuJo to the Hall depends in large part on the hardware he lacks, be it the Stanley Cup - he never reached a final in 19 seasons with the Blues, Edmonton Oilers, Toronto Maple Leafs, Detroit Red Wings, Phoenix Coyotes, and Calgary Flames - or individual laurels such as the Vezina. That shortcoming helped keep Joseph out for the ninth year running Wednesday when the class of 2020 was revealed.
Selection committees and armchair pundits employ this sort of superficial reasoning across sports, and the coda to Joseph's brilliant 1992-93 season illustrates its flaws. Entertain this alternative scenario: Joseph's stats and uplifting impact on his middling Blues team remain the same, but Vezina voters of the day actually recognize and value what his mastery compared to league average signifies. They award him the trophy, and two decades later his career is deemed Hall material.
Whether that first outcome should have been realized - whether Joseph, not Belfour, would have been the just Vezina victor in '93 - is beside the essential point. Joseph was terrific that season and shone in many others, and to dismiss his Hall case outright because he never won a major award is to think simplistically.
Joseph, a 5-foot-11 acrobat in the crease, was rarely afforded the privilege of backstopping a superb team, and when the lineups in front of him fit that bill, like the defending champion 2002-03 Red Wings, he didn't lift them over the top. (Blame J.S. Giguere.) On the whole, though, he was a workhorse whose numbers support favorable comparisons to titans of his position. And he tended to elevate his game when it really mattered, equipping him to carry several pedestrian Blues, Oilers, and Leafs squads deeper into the postseason than was their right.
After signing as a college free agent with St. Louis in 1989, Joseph went on to finish in the top five in Vezina voting in five of his first 11 seasons, including a close second-place showing behind Dominik Hasek in 1998-99. He was No. 4 in Hart Trophy voting with the Leafs that season, and the following year he won the King Clancy Memorial Trophy for leadership and humanitarianism, a nod to his charitable work with sick children in Toronto.
Consistency and longevity were hallmarks of Joseph's. His 943 career games played are sixth-most in league history and his 454 wins rank seventh; only Martin Brodeur, Patrick Roy, Roberto Luongo, and Belfour eclipse him in both categories. (It has to be noted that Joseph is third in career losses, with 352.) His 51-shutout total isn't top grade, but he authored 16 in the playoffs, third to Brodeur and Roy. Few goalies saw more rubber: Joseph faced 26,795 shots, sixth-most ever, and made 24,279 saves, also sixth all time.
"He thrived with more shots against him, and not a lot of guys are like that. In fact, very few guys are able to do that when they get peppered all the time," retired goalie Kevin Weekes wrote about Joseph at NHL.com in 2015.
“When I think of CuJo, I think of a goalie who gave his team a chance to win every night," Glenn Healy, Joseph's former backup with the Leafs, told the Toronto Sun in May. "What more was he supposed to do?"
Goalies like Joseph suffer when their names appear before the Hall from a high bar and a double standard. Belfour is a Hall of Famer; so are Brodeur, Hasek, Roy, Grant Fuhr, Billy Smith, and Rogie Vachon. Somehow, only those seven men have been inducted at the position in the past 30 years. As the New York Post's Larry Brooks once pointed out, many of the goalies who are enshrined played the bulk of their career prior to World War II. A mere 22 are products of the NHL's Original Six era or later.
Former New York Rangers stalwart Ed Giacomin is the only one of them who never won a Stanley Cup, an otherwise uniform barrier to entry that voters don't extend to skaters. That knock applies to Joseph, but not to Barrasso, Chris Osgood, Mike Richter, or Mike Vernon, fellow marginal Hall candidates from CuJo's era who have eight championships between them. It all goes back to Brooks' point: maybe the Hall of Fame committee's expectations for netminders are unreasonably high. (At least this year's class includes Canadian women's legend Kim St-Pierre, a three-time Olympic gold medallist.)
Joseph keeps even finer company in Hockey-Reference's career-similarity tabulation, which compares players at the same position based on their adjusted point shares by season. The quality and arc of his career rate as most similar to that of Vachon, the three-time champ with the Montreal Canadiens in the '60s and '70s who entered the Hall in 2016, 34 years after he retired. Among the other goalies with whom Joseph is classed: Belfour, Brodeur, Roy, Tony Esposito, and Henrik Lundqvist.
That isn't to say Joseph was better than any of them - just that he belonged in their orbit, as the dominance he summoned regularly in the playoffs attests. Joseph's Toronto clubs were never elite, but he spearheaded postseason runs in all four of his years there. He stole first-round series victories for lackluster Oilers teams against much stronger opponents: the Dallas Stars in 1996-97, when games of 43 and 38 saves keyed OT road wins in Games 5 and 7, and the Colorado Avalanche in 1997-98, when he erased a 3-1 series deficit by allowing just one goal the rest of the way.
Working backward, we arrive at his magnum opus: the 1993 playoffs with St. Louis. That was the year Joseph saved 61 of 63 shots in a double-OT loss to the Leafs, who might have reached the final had Wayne Gretzky's high stick on Doug Gilmour been penalized later in the spring. Joseph made 57 stops the next game, this time to win in double OT, and he prolonged the second-round series as far as Game 7 despite the Blues being outshot, on average, by 12 attempts per night.
If only that could have bolstered his Vezina case. At least Joseph got to relish ending the eventual Vezina winner's season. Belfour and the Blackhawks finished 21 points ahead of the Blues in the '93 Norris Division standings but were swept from the first round, undone by their inability to solve CuJo. Joseph's save percentage in the series was .957, and he blanked Chicago in Games 2 and 3, cinching the first of those historically tremendous 16 playoff shutouts.
Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.
