SAN JOSE – San Jose Sharks radio play-by-play voice Dan Rusanowsky returned home Tuesday, one day after he was officially enshrined into the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto as the recipient of this year’s Foster Hewitt Memorial Award, hockey broadcasting’s highest honor.
Now the question is which individual synonymous with the Sharks will be the next to get a Hall call. Turns out, Mr. Shark, Patrick Marleau, is eligible for election this summer.
Certainly, Marleau’s resume will be worthy of consideration.
Including playoffs, Marleau has 566 regular season goals, 23rd-most all-time, and is 52nd with 1,197 points. He was selected as an NHL All-Star three times and won Olympic gold medals with Team Canada in 2010 and 2014. Most notably, Marleau, now 44, is the NHL’s all-team leader in regular season games played with 1,779.
Every retired player who scored more NHL regular-season goals than Marleau is in the Hall. All but three players who have more points than Marleau – Jeremy Roenick (1,216), Bernie Nicholls (1,209), and Vincent Damphousse (1,205) – have also been elected or inducted.
Perhaps working against Marleau from being elected in his first year of eligibility is that he never won one of the NHL’s major individual awards.
After the 2009-2010 season, when he set career highs with 44 goals and 83 points, Marleau finished ninth in Hart Trophy voting as the player adjudged to be the most valuable to his team. He was also a finalist for the Lady Byng Award, given to the player “adjudged to have exhibited the best type of sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct combined with a high standard of playing ability” in both 2006 and 2014.
“That would be that’d be pretty amazing, obviously, to be with all those great players,” Marleau said in September about potentially being elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame at some point. “To have your name in there for the rest of history, it’s humbling if that were to happen, I’d be extremely excited and I don’t know what I would do, but that’d be pretty crazy.”
Marleau’s election depends on the 18 members of the Hockey Hall of Fame selection committee, a mixture of executives, media, and former players and coaches who gather each year and consider potential inductees under a rigid selection process.
Committee members are allowed to nominate no more than one individual in the Player Category, the Builder Category, and the Referee or Linesman Category.
Those nominations must be filed with the Chair of the Board of Directors or Selection Committee by a certain date each year. From that pool, the committee can select a maximum of four male players, two female players, and either two builders or one builder and one referee or linesman. All nominated candidates needed to receive at least 14 votes (75%) to get in.
Other male players who could get consideration this year are goalie Ryan Miller, forwards Pavel Datsyuk, Ilya Kovalchuk, Alex Mogilny, Keith Tkachuk, Roenick, and defenseman Shea Weber.
There is no limit to how many times a player can be considered.
Joe Thornton, who recently announced his retirement, is eligible for consideration in 2025.
To be eligible, individuals must have not played in a professional or international hockey game during any of the three playing seasons prior to his or her election.
Rusanowsky will call Tuesday’s game between the Sharks and Florida Panthers at SAP Center. Marleau now works in the Sharks’ front office as a player development coach and hockey operations advisor.
DECISION TIME NEARS: Defenseman Matt Benning, on injured reserve, skated again Tuesday morning and is getting closer to a return to the lineup, Sharks coach Quinn said. When Benning does come back, the Sharks will have a roster decision to make, assuming every other defenseman stays healthy in the meantime.
The Sharks are carrying eight defensemen on their 23-man active roster and all of them would require waivers to be sent to the AHL. But if the Sharks do not go down to 12 forwards, a defenseman would, from all appearances, have to be waived.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen between now and when he’s activated, so I don’t look that far ahead,” Quinn said of Benning. “But if everybody stays healthy, then there’s going to have to be some decisions.”
Nikolai Knyzhov, 25, had been a healthy scratch in five of the last seven Sharks games before Tuesday, and it was immediately clear whether he would play against Florida. Knyzhov is in the first year of a two-year, $2.5 million contract extension he signed with the Sharks in March.
The Sharks were in a similar numbers game before the season began last month and placed Radim Simek on waivers. Simek cleared, is now with the Barracuda, and the Sharks are having to keep $1.1 million of his $2.25 million cap hit on their books as a result.
