‘I wasn’t sitting by the phone.’ Hall of Fame inductees Barrasso, Vernon, Turgeon make 2023 the Class of the Forgotten

“I thought Lanny was calling me for a golf game,” said Mike Vernon.

“I definitely wasn’t sitting by the phone,” said Tom Barrasso.

Score one for the forgotten.

Year of the Snubs? That wouldn’t even do it justice. The Hockey Hall of Fame dug even deeper than that when it unveiled its Class of 2023 on Wednesday afternoon. If it wanted to honor the players perceived by the public as most overdue for induction, it might have leaned toward Curtis Joseph and Alexander Mogilny. Instead, the Hall focused on a collection of players who had been passed over so many times that it felt like their opportunities had come and gone.

Tom Barrasso, Mike Vernon and Pierre Turgeon played their final NHL games in 2002, 2002 and 2007, respectively. With each passing year, their competition for spots in the Hall grew. Barrasso and Vernon were contesting with the likes of Joseph and Tim Thomas; Turgeon had to beat out hopefuls such as Keith Tkachuk, Rod Brind’Amour, Jeremy Roenick, Patrik Elias and Henrik Zetterberg.

But, suddenly, the overlooked trio heard their names called. They are Hall of Famers. Real talk: none of them saw it coming. Speaking on a conference call Wednesday, Barrasso admitted he was difficult for the Hall selection committee to even reach on the phone. Eligible since 2006, he had made peace with the idea of not getting in long ago.

“I think as a player, you’re competitive, and you hold yourself in certain regard as to how you think your career was,” Barrasso said. “This is obviously the ultimate honor. Do you make that grade or not? It’s not for you to decide. It’s for others to decide. As time goes by you think, ‘Well, it’s not going to happen.’ You just grow to accept that, and you say ‘That’s OK, I’ll write down what my career was and I’m happy with that. Whether I got in or not, I would still have those same exact feelings…So it’s a tremendous honor to have been selected by the committee and it puts a bit of a validation on the idea of what I thought along the way of my career.”

Of course, Barrasso, Vernon and Turgeon weren’t the sole inductees. The Hall covered the slam-dunks off, too. Goaltender Henrik Lundqvist was the automatic pick for 2023’s surefire first-balloter. In his first 10 NHL seasons, he never finished lower than sixth in the Vezina Trophy vote. He was a five-time finalist and captured his one and only Vezina in 2011-12. Across that 10-year peak, Lundqvist led all goaltenders in starts, wins and shutouts, and he posted the fifth-best save percentage among netminders with 100 or more appearances. He won 459 games, the sixth-most in NHL history. He led Team Sweden to Olympic gold at the 2006 Winter Games in Torino.

Caroline Ouellette got the call in her second year of eligibility when, really, she was worthy of first-ballot treatment, winner of four Olympic gold medals, four Clarkson Cups, the CWHL MVP and Clarkson Cup MVP.

On the builder side, Ken Hitchcock and Pierre Lacroix had each accomplished more than enough to earn their nods. The innovative ‘Hitch’ has coached dominant teams across an incredible career that included a 1999 Stanley Cup and 849 wins, the fourth most in NHL history. Lacroix, posthumously inducted, built the dominant Colorado Avalanche teams of the mid-1990s through the early 2000s.

But the misfits, the forgotten, were the ones who had jaws dropping Wednesday.

Barrasso was long mentioned among the Hall’s most glaring omissions in debates from barrooms to Twitter. He won the Vezina Trophy and Calder Trophy as an 18-year-old coming out of high school with the Buffalo Sabres in 1983-84. He was a Vezina finalist in three of his first five seasons and five times overall. He backstopped the Pittsburgh Penguins to consecutive Stanley Cups in 1991 and 1992. His 369 wins sit him 20^th all-time. Any way you slice it, he met the Hall’s unofficial standard long ago. Hall of Fame historian and statistical analyst Paul Pidutti of Adjusted Hockey recently pegged Barrasso and Joseph as the two most deserving goaltenders who had been overlooked for the Hall.

The reason for Barrasso not getting the call was never quantifiable but always agreed upon in whispered conversations: his prickly relationship with the media and the sport in general left him out in the cold, out of the limelight and out of the public consciousness. Was that conspiracy theory overblown or something he’s willing to acknowledge with the benefit of hindsight?

“At the end of the day, it’s not really the media that’s on that committee, so I don’t think that’s anything that’s ever been in the back of my mind,” Barrasso said. “The media didn’t help me win games, they didn’t make me lose games. It was just me showing up and doing my job and trying to not ever be too conscious of that. Fortunately there was no internet back then, so I didn’t read anything, I didn’t watch television, I didn’t pay much attention to it. You always know there’s a negative vibe out there, which is not fun to deal with, but if that’s the path you’re going down you just deal with it. I don’t particularly have much regret over that.

“There’s people out there that are not pulling for you sometimes. That’s the way it goes. You don’t need to be posing with them. The people you need on your side are your teammates, your family, that’s what gets you through.”

Vernon’s case wasn’t as strong as Barrasso’s on paper, but the colorful, diminutive puck-stopper was known as a winner. He outdueled the Montreal Canadiens’ Patrick Roy in the 1988-89 Stanley Cup Final to help the Calgary Flames win their first and only Stanley Cup. Vernon was a rock for the 1996-97 Detroit Red Wings, helping them end a 42-year drought with a Conn Smythe Trophy winning performance that again included besting Roy, this time in the Western Conference Final against his Colorado Avalanche. Still, Vernon was just a one-time second-team all-star and a one-time Vezina Trophy finalist. Considering a two-time Vezina winner in Thomas hadn’t heard his name called, it was never a given that Vernon would.

And then there was Turgeon, who could until Wednesday lay claim to having the most career points of any eligible player not in the Hall Fame with 1,327. The 1987 NHL Draft’s first overall pick was an excellent two-way player, peaking with a 132-point season in 1992-93. Having accumulated so many points during the league’s peak offensive era, however, he only cracked the league’s top 10 in scoring twice in 19 seasons. His odds of induction were thus severely shrunken after 13 years of eligibility. He recognized how much the call meant Wednesday and embraced it as a true fan of the game who says he still constantly plays at 53 years old.

The lesson learned from the inductees’ reactions Wednesday: receiving the fateful call erases the pain of not receiving it all those years. Not everyone can be a first-balloter.

“It’s an emotional time for me,” Vernon said. “It might be a long time coming but it’s still worth it. It’s such an honor what the group has done in selecting me to this. It’s unbelievable. My phone has been lighting up with texts.”

Maybe next year, Joseph’s and Mogliny’s phones will finally, justifiably light up with texts. While this year constitutes another snub, it also serves as a reminder that it’s not too late.

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‘I wasn’t sitting by the phone.’ Hall of Fame inductees Barrasso, Vernon, Turgeon make 2023 the Class of the Forgotten

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