Many women deserve to be in the Hockey Hall of Fame. It’s time to let more of them in

First, let’s talk about Riikka Sallinen.

In her first year of eligibility, Sallinen became the first female Finnish player – and the first woman from outside Canada or the U.S. – to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, as announced on Monday afternoon.

Sallinen had an excellent career that started before women’s international hockey really hit the mainstream. She played in the first IIHF-sanctioned Women’s World Championships in 1990, was named the tournament’s best player in 1994 and led the 1997 tournament in scoring; Sallinen was the first woman to be named a top-three forward in three consecutive tournaments.

In her first Olympics, in 1998 – the first Games to include women’s hockey – she led the tournament in scoring and led Finland to a bronze medal. Over almost two decades with the Finnish National Team, Sallinen won seven world championship medals and ended her career with another Olympic bronze medal in 2018, becoming the oldest hockey player to win an Olympic medal at age 44.

She is the all-time leading European scorer in the world championships and Olympics — and she’s someone opponents hated playing against. Sallinen pioneered a path for new Finnish stars like Jenni Hiirikoski, Petra Nieminen and Michelle Karvinen, who are among the best players in the world.

She is already in the IIHF Hall of Fame, and with such a long and decorated career, Sallinen is a natural fit for Hockey Hall of Fame enshrinement. She is beyond deserving of this honour.

But she’s also not the only deserving player. And yet, when Sallinen attends the 2022 induction in November, she will be the lone woman on stage — despite there being two spots available in the women’s category each year and a ton of eligible, accomplished athletes to choose from.

The most recent example: Caroline Ouellette, one of the best, most dominant players of her generation, was eligible for the first time this year. Somehow, despite her 10 gold medals, clutch goals, and ranking third all-time in Team Canada scoring, Ouellette couldn’t get the 14 votes from an 18-person committee needed for induction.

It’s a glaring omission, an indicator that the HHOF has issues with how they decide which women are worthy of induction and another name in a growing backlog of worthy candidates.

The HHOF is a place for players who achieve excellence. There are dozens of female players who have done just that, but the Hall doesn’t include enough of them. They don’t even come close.

It’s been 12 years since Cammi Granato and Angela James were the first female inductees. Nine women – including Sallinen – have been voted in since then. Given the option for two-player classes, there could be as many as 24 women in the Hall of Fame by now.

The committee has taken the option of inducting two women into the same HOF class once, in 2010. Seven times they’ve elected one woman. Four times they’ve elected none.

Is the issue a lack of deserving candidates? Unequivocally, no.

Ouellette deserves it. Her case is, as The Athletic’s Eric Duhatschek put it last year during our mock induction, “simply overwhelming.” He was on the Hall’s induction committee for the maximum 15-year term.

Oullette had longevity as well as excellence, and was known as one of the most dominant players in the game and one of the hardest to defend. That matters. Or at least it should.

Oullette never lost an Olympic final in her near 20 year-career – her first medal was in 1999 and she officially retired in 2018 – and is one of only five athletes to win a gold medal at four consecutive Olympic Winter Games. She is a six-time IIHF World Championship gold medallist and six-time silver medallist. She is third all-time in games played with the Canadian women’s national team and ranks third in scoring with 84 goals, 150 assists and 234 points in 205 international games – only sitting behind Hall of Famers Jayna Hefford and Hayley Wickenheiser.

You cannot overlook her success outside the international arena either. She was a two-time MVP in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League and won the Clarkson Cup four times with the Montreal Les Canadiennes. In three seasons at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, Ouellette had 229 points (92 goals, 137 assists) in 97 games, an average of 2.36 points per game. That’s third-all time in Bulldogs history. She was a top-three finalist for the Patty Kazmaier Award (best female player in NCAA), won an NCAA championship and was named MVP of the tournament.

Ouellette checks all the boxes; her credentials are impeccable – but 14 people couldn’t agree she was good enough.

It doesn’t make much sense. Especially when we consider a female inductee would never take a spot from a male player. Her induction, for example, wouldn’t mean Daniel Sedin couldn’t get into the Hall with his twin brother.

And she’s just a recent example. There are more.

Jennifer Botterill has been eligible for the Hall since 2014 – she retired in 2011 after a 14-year career primed for Hockey Hall of Fame enshrinement. It just hasn’t come yet.

Botterill cracked Canada’s Olympic roster in 1998 —  at those Games, Team USA won gold; Canada silver. At 18, she was the youngest player on the team. Botterill became a key member of Canada’s dominant run at the Olympics, with gold medals in 2002, 2006 and 2010. She’s a five-time world champion and a two-time MVP of the tournament, with three silver medals.

At Harvard, Botterill led the Crimson to their first-ever national title in her freshman year, was a four-time All-American and remains the only two-time national player of the year. She ended her NCAA career with 157 goals and 340 points in 113 games and still holds several NCAA (all-time points per game) and Harvard (all-time scoring) records.

Julie Chu has been eligible for a few years now and is one of Team USA’s most decorated athletes with four Olympic medals (3 silver, 1 bronze) and nine world championship medals (five gold, four silver). She was the first Asian-American to make the U.S. senior national team in 2000, when she was just 18 years old. She led the 2008 worlds in assists and the 2009 worlds in points, winning gold on both occasions. Chu is one of three American women to play in four Olympics, including Hall of Fame defender Angela Ruggiero and future candidate Hilary Knight. At Harvard, she set NCAA records for assists (197) and points (285). Her points record was broken by Meghan Agosta, but she still ranks third all-time.

(Note: Botterill has more points than Chu and Agosta, but the NCAA did not start tracking record books for women’s hockey until 2000-01.)

Meghan Duggan captained Team USA to its first Olympic Gold medal in 20 years at the 2018 Games in PyeongChang after winning silver in 2010 and 2014. Duggan played in eight world championships, winning seven times. In college, she won three NCAA championships with the University of Wisconsin, won a national player of the year award and graduated as the No. 1 scorer in program history. Off the ice, Duggan was pivotal in the negotiations with USA Hockey for fair compensation for players.

That’s only four players, and I haven’t even mentioned any Europeans, or goalies.

Florence Schelling was a standout goalie for Northeastern and the Swiss National Team. Kim Martin won two Olympic medals (one silver, one bronze) for Sweden and was notably the goalie who backstopped Sweden to their first-ever Olympic gold medal game, making 37 saves in the semifinal to upset the U.S. in 2006, when she was named goalie of the tournament. She was a finalist for NCAA player of the year and won an NCAA Championship MVP in 2008, too. Maria Rooth is another Swede with an impressive resume: 18 points in 20 Olympic games; 164 points in 92 games at Minnesota-Duluth; a three-time Patty Kazmaier finalist; and two-time Olympic medallist. Jenny Potter won four Olympic medals with Team USA and has the most career points at the Olympics of any American player (32). Natalie Darwitz was one of the best U.S. players ever, with a lasting impact on Team USA after making her first senior team at 15 years old. She still has the most Olympic goals for Team USA (14).

I could go on, but you get the point. There are plenty of women’s hockey players who fit the criteria for induction: “Playing ability, sportsmanship, character and contributions to his or her team or teams and to the game of hockey in general.”

These are some of the best players to ever play the women’s game and they are still on the outside looking in.

Why?

First, there’s the fact that Cassie Campbell-Pascall and Granato are the only two women on an 18-person committee; Granato was a very recent addition.

That’s a problem when the trick of the Hall of Fame is getting 14 hard-nosed people to agree on something. We can expect former teammates or rivals to bang the table for other deserving women. But what of the men in the room?

The Hockey Hall of Fame is about honouring the best players in the world. It’s not the NHL Hall of Fame. And the committee needs to do a better job of honouring successful careers when it comes to the female ballot. Because there are deserving players waiting for reasons that remain a mystery to me.

They are good enough to be there. They are winning gold medals, world championships, national championships. They are breaking and setting records. That is the measure of success in the women’s game.

Voting in Sallinen and Ouellette shouldn’t be that hard.

This isn’t agonizing over whether Guy Carbonneau should finally get in. Or whether to vote for Rod Brind’Amour or Henrik Zetterberg. We’re still early enough into the process of inducting women into the HHOF that these candidates are the tap-ins. They’re the no-doubt, “got my vote” success stories. They should be, at least. But the committee seems to be making it more complicated than it needs to be.

So how can it get better?

In the long term it’s about involving more female players, more people with experience and stakes in the women’s game into the voting committee. That’s a long-term goal though. These appointments last a long time and the people on the committee have earned those spots.

But in the meantime, before you can get a more representative group of inductors, it’s not that hard to look at the numbers.

If you’re trying to fill out the women’s wing of the Hockey Hall of Fame and you can’t say the third leading scoring in the history of Canadian women’s hockey doesn’t deserve a spot, what are we doing here?

Inducting talented, accomplished, deserving women to the Hockey Hall of Fame comes at the cost of no one, certainly not when there’s only one woman going in every year. It comes at the cost of an empty seat on induction day.

In years to come the process will only get more complicated. There is a backlog of talent developing that is going to get worse as more accomplished players become eligible for induction.

Kacey Bellamy is already retired. Monique and Jocelyn Lamoureux retired last year. Shannon Szabados, one of the best female goalies to play women’s hockey, hasn’t played since 2018. Neither has four-time Canadian Olympian Meghan Agosta. Jenni Hiirikoski, Hilary Knight, Marie-Philip Poulin and Brianna Decker are going to retire eventually.

Hopefully at that point the mindset of the committee will have shifted. But until then, the fix is easy. It should be, at least.

(Photo of Caroline Ouellette and Meghan Duggan: AP Photo / Mark Humphrey)