What was the best team in NHL history without a single Hall of Fame player? (2024)

Today’s time-waster is a simple one: What’s the best team in history that didn’t have a single Hall of Fame player on the roster?

A few of you have sent in variations of the question over the years, and it’s a good one. Nice and easy. I’m not even sure we need the traditional bullet-point ground rules.

We’ll do this by decade, more or less, going back to the first expansion. For more recent teams, we’ll obviously have to use some judgment and common sense over who might make the Hall someday. The 2017-18 Capitals don’t have a single Hall of Famer right now, but I have a feeling that Ovechkin guy might get in eventually, so we won’t count them. That challenge will get easier as we work back, but never completely go away, since the committee sometimes drops a decades-old selection on us, seemingly out of nowhere. But we’ll do our best, and maybe check in with old pal Paul Pidutti and his Adjusted Hockey model for a sanity check when we need it.

With that in mind, let’s give this a shot. We’ll start in the 2010s and work our way back.

2010s

Most of the great teams of this decade are from the Penguins, Lightning and Capitals, which all have guys I’d consider eventual slam dunks. The Kings have Drew Doughty and the Bruins have Patrice Bergeron, so they don’t work. The 2010-11 Canucks were dominant, but they had the Sedins and Roberto Luongo. And there are some great teams from the Rangers and Ducks and Sharks that get eliminated by Martin St. Louis and Teemu Selanne and Joe Thornton.

This won’t be easy. Which of course is the whole point.

A few teams do jump out as candidates. The obvious one is the 2018-19 Blues, who weren’t exactly a great team during the season but did win the Stanley Cup. At first glance, they seemed like an ideal team for this sort of exercise, one that was more than the sum of its parts and wasn’t driven by a legendary superstar. I don’t think Ryan O’Reilly is on a HHOF track, Vladimir Tarasenko would need a hell of a finishing kick to even get in the conversation and younger guys like Robert Thomas and Jordan Kyrou aren’t on pace yet.

The one name here that could derail us is Alex Pietrangelo. He doesn’t have a Norris, but he’s a three-time all-star with two Cups, and his similarity list is filled with guys like Scott Niedermayer, Doug Wilson and Larry Murphy. I checked Adjusted Hockey, where they use a point system with a standard HHOF cutoff for defensem*n of 269. Pietrangelo scores … 269 on the nose. Great. No clarity there, but the implication is that he’s on pace to at least be a strong candidate, so let’s keep looking.

Two other teams stick out as possibilities. The first is the 2015-16 Stars, who hit the 50-win mark while winning the Central. Their top scorers were Jamie Benn, Tyler Seguin and Jason Spezza, and while Benn still has a shot at the HHOF, he would feel like an underdog at this point. The other is the 2016-17 Wild, who had 49 wins and 106 points under Bruce Boudreau. They’ve got a couple of maybes in Eric Staal and Ryan Suter, but I don’t think either guy is going to make it.

All in all, I think the Blues have to be the pick for the decade, unless Pietrangelo ruins it. Let’s see what we can find by going back a bit further.

2000s

This decade’s top seasons are dominated by teams like Detroit and San Jose, who don’t help us. But as it turns out, we don’t have to go very far down the list to get to a team that definitely does.

That would be the 2006-07 Sabres, who won 53 games on their way to 113 points and the franchise’s only Presidents’ Trophy. They went to the conference final before losing to Ottawa, but none of the skaters stand out as Hall candidates. The best of the group were co-captains Chris Drury and Danny Briere, who famously both left as UFAs that summer. Neither is getting in, and neither are Thomas Vanek or Brian Campbell. The one guy who could derail us is Ryan Miller, who was eligible for the first time this year and didn’t make the cut. The Hall is weird about goalies, and Miller has a case that slots in behind Curtis Joseph but alongside names like Pekka Rinne and Tuukka Rask. I think he probably falls short, but we may not know for a while.

We get a near-miss from those 2007 Senators, who beat the Sabres and went to the final with a collection of good-but-not-legendary guys that included 2022 inductee Daniel Alfredsson. The 2006 Hurricanes you’re probably thinking about had Mark Recchi.

The Sabres are the pick here, but if I need a Miller-related backup then I’ll take the 2009-10 Coyotes, who somehow won 50 games with a roster where Shane Doan is the best candidate by a mile. Honestly, the next-best option might be 40-year-old Mathieu Schneider, whose Coyotes career lasted eight games. That team was as rag-tag as they come. Would it shock you to learn that head coach Dave Tippett won the Jack Adams that year?

Children, be warned — we’re about to reach back into a time in NHL history when there were no points for losing. Will we be able to find any good teams at all without a contrived standings page to boost them up? Let’s find out …

1990s

Huh. Maybe this was a bad idea.

The difficulty sure seems to ramp up once we get to the 1990s, and while I didn’t really think this through initially, it makes sense. Today’s NHL is a young man’s league, but back then it wasn’t unusual for star players to still be considered in their prime well into their 30s. If you were a decent team, you probably had a few guys like that; if you didn’t, you tried to get them. And since they were still productive, they naturally filtered towards the contenders, a sort of hockey circle of life that’s making our job a lot tougher on today’s question.

How tough? The best team I could find in terms of points had just 92. Back then, a 92-point season was pretty good, roughly the equivalent of a low 100-point season today. This particular team at least backed up their regular season with a strong playoff, going all the way to the final. I’m guessing a few of you just figured out who it is.

Yes, it’s our old pals the 1995-96 Florida Panthers, the team we’ve singled out as being personally responsible for the Dead Cap era that ruined hockey. Not only did they not have a Hall of Famer on the roster, there’s nobody who’s even remotely close. Unless the committee absolutely loses their mind on 300-win goalies and eventually inducts John Vanbiesbrouck, this pick is as safe as they come.

By the way, honorable mention goes to the 1993-94 Capitals, just because it feels like we have to have some ’90s Caps representation here. Before Ovechkin came along, there was a time when you could count on the Capitals to have Mike Ridley as their leading scorer, a trio of 30-year-old goalies, all the goals coming from their defensem*n and Craig Berube involved in a lot of fights either for or against them. They’d have 88 points and finish third in the Patrick before losing in the second round. We used to be a society.

If the ’90s were tough, I can only imagine what we’re up against next.

1980s

The Islanders and Oilers dominate the decade, and obviously don’t help us. Neither do the Flames, Bruins or Habs. I got briefly excited at the mid- and late ’80s Flyers, but Mark Howe ruins that. And so we start scrolling.

We have a near-miss on a legitimately great team in the 1980-81 Blues, who had 107 points, but borderline HHOFer Bernie Federko puts a stop to that. There are some very good early ’80s North Stars teams that get taken out by Dino Ciccarelli. And as much as I’d love to use the 86-87 Whalers, that was before they gave away Ron Francis.

In the end, the only 90-plus point teams I can find are the 1981-82 and 1983-84 Rangers. They had 92 and 93 points, respectively, and the 1982 team even won a round. Both were eliminated by the Islanders dynasty, but the 1982 team took them to six games, and the 1984 squad even pushed them to the brink of elimination in Round 1, something only one other team did during the Isles’ 19-series win streak. Those Rangers teams actually had a lot of turnover between them, but were led by hard-nosed defenseman Barry Beck and had fun players like Ron Duguay and Anders Hedberg. No Hall of Famers, though — Vanbiesbrouck shows up again, but we’re otherwise safe on these picks. We’ll go with the 1981-82 team, which at least won a round, and did have a 103-point scorer in Mike Rogers.

One last decade (and change) to go before we call it a day.

1967–1979

There’s no point even trying this for a six-team league, so this is as far back as we’ll go. I’m assuming we’ll end up with an expansion team here, but let’s see.

We come close with the 1974-75 Kings, who somehow managed 105 points despite not having any skater crack 80 points in an era where everyone did. Unfortunately for us, Rogie Vachon’s surprise election after three decades of eligibility scuttles that.

Those late ’60s expansion teams aren’t as much help as I’d hoped, because most of them were terrible and the Blues had Glenn Hall. Some of the 1970s additions do offer up options, like the 1974-75 Canucks, who won the Smythe Division with André Boudrias leading the charge. The Atlanta Flames show up in 1978-79, winning 41 games with 100-point seasons from the dynamic duo of Bob MacMillan and Guy Chouinard. And the 1974-75 Penguins are fun, posting 89 points while being led by Ron Schock and Syl Apps, but not that Syl Apps.

But I think our winner here is the 1979-80 North Stars, and no I don’t want to have a philosophical argument about whether they’re a ’70s or ’80s team right now. They went 36-28-16 while finishing fourth in goals scored and sixth in fewest goals allowed. Their offensive leaders were Al MacAdam and Steve Payne, their goalie was Gilles Meloche and their best defenseman was Craig Hartsburg. They made the playoffs, swept the Leafs in the preliminary round, and then wrote their names in the history books by being the team to end the Canadiens’ dynasty, becoming the first team in five years to beat Montreal in the playoffs with a seven-game upset.

Maybe 88 points isn’t a lot, but slaying a giant is worth a few bonus marks. The North Stars are our team

And the winner is …

That’s as far as we’re going to need to go, and of the teams we’ve found, I think the 2006-07 Sabres are the safest bet. The Blues won the Cup, yes, but I think it’s probably too early to feel safe on ruling out Pietrangelo. Meanwhile, that Sabres team was scary good, a very legitimate Cup contender that absolutely could have won it all if things had broken a bit differently in the postseason. I’m a little nervous about an eventual Miller induction ruining this for us, but hopefully if that happens he’ll do the right thing and decline to help us out.

Now it’s your turn. If you’ve got a team you think I missed, let me hear it. I’m also open to nominations for current or recent teams that you think might make the list someday.

(And yes, I know you folks well enough to guess that now you want to know the worst team with the most Hall of Famers. We’ll get to that one someday.)

(Photo of Ryan O’Reilly and Vladimir Tarasenko: Brian Babineau / NHLI via Getty Images)

Sean McIndoe has been a senior NHL writer with The Athletic since 2018. He launched Down Goes Brown in 2008 and has been writing about hockey ever since, with stops including Grantland, Sportsnet and Vice Sports. His book, "The Down Goes Brown History of the NHL," is available in book stores now. Follow Sean on Twitter @DownGoesBrown