Big miss on Weber.
Everyone is forgetting the many years Weber was considered a top 5 dman in the league. There were even years he was considered the best or second best.
He’s not much different than a Keith or Doughty who are both locks for the HOF. Weber played for a mediocre team though.
Yea, those two obviously have Norris and cup wins that put them ahead in terms of career resumes, but in terms of quality of play I don’t think he’s too far behind.
He’s in the Triple Gold Club because he was a passenger (7 pts in 23 games) on a Stanley Cup team.
Prior to that, he was a passenger (3 pts in 10 games) on a ludicrously overpowered World Championship team.
Prior to that, his Olympic gold came in the pre-professional era when the Soviets were the only team icing top players… and even in that context he was just a kid playing in the middle 6.
In between all that, during the actual meat of his career when it mattered, he had two noteworthy seasons and about a dozen where it was easy to forget he was even in the league.
That leaves the defection. While a nice story, it’s not a reason to put a player in the HHOF. Certainly not if you’re gonna leave out all the other guys who also risked their necks during that era. Induct them as a cohort? Sure.
Don’t get me wrong, he’ll get in because he’s the player du jour in these conversations. Eventually the committee will buckle to the pressure and let him through. Then we’ll turn our attention to someone else who doesn’t belong, someone we’re not talking about at all right now, and some of us will be scratching our heads and thinking “this guy was never even dreamed of as a HHOF’er when he was on the ice, why are we talking about him as a snub 20 years later?”.
I mean, let’s not exaggerate too much. He played at a top line level for a number of those years. For 5 consecutive years between ‘92 and ‘96 he was 13th, 4th, 18th, 14th and 9th in points per game. Over those 5 years combined, he was 2nd in goals, 10th in points, 4th in GPG and 6th in PPG. He was considered a legit star at the time. Then he was 5th in GPG and 13th in PPG in ‘01 and 11th in PPG in ‘03. And even in ‘91, ‘97 and ‘98 he was top 30 in PPG, and just outside the top 30 in ‘02.
So outside of those two big years he still had 5 seasons in the top 20 in PPG, 3 more in the top 30 and another at 32.
As for the comment about “never dreamed of as a Hall of Famer when he was on the ice”, I get what you’re saying here and was the case for a lot of recent guys like Andreychuk, but Mogilny was one of the most talented and exciting players in the league for a number of years. People absolutely thought he was a Hall of Famer in the early to mid 90s. His career certainly leaves something to be desired compared to his talent and I don’t think he’s a clear inductee who deserves the complaints in this thread. But other than a little more consistency at peak, I think his career is pretty similar to someone like Kariya.