Red Wings' Chris Osgood: Hockey Hall of Famer?

It’s been a big couple of weeks for Detroit Red Wings goaltender Chris Osgood.

He currently leads the NHL in GAA, is third in the league with a .925 save percentage, and has compiled a 20-3-2 record at the All-Star break.

On Sunday afternoon, he will be the starting goaltender for the Western Conference All-Star team in Atlanta. And two weeks ago, he signed a three year contract extension worth $1.5 million per season, which should essentially guarantee that he’ll end his career as a Red Wing.

All of these tidbits of information lead me to the point I am considering in this article, and something that I’ve seen debated on message boards in the past: Should Chris Osgood be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame when his career ends?

It’s an interesting question. There are compelling reasons why Ozzie should be a Hall of Famer. On the other hand, there are good reasons to exclude him from hockey’s most exclusive club. It’s an argument that is going to continue for many years to come.

Let’s start with some numbers. Osgood is currently 14^th on the all-time career wins list with 356. His three-year extension makes it likely that he’ll climb even higher on the list, possibly as high as seventh or eighth. He may be able to go even higher if the Wings decide Jimmy Howard isn’t ready for the starter’s job and Ozzie is the starter for the duration of the new contract.

Passing the 400 win mark would be a significant achievement. There are only nine men that have reached that milestone. Three of them are still active and the other six have all been inducted into the Hall of Fame. The three that are still active—Martin Brodeur, Ed Belfour, and Curtis Joseph—are likely candidates for the Hall of Fame when their careers end.

Osgood is also a Stanley Cup champion—winning rings with Detroit in 1997 (as a backup to Mike Vernon, even though he played the majority of the games in the regular season) and 1998, as the starter after Vernon was traded to San Jose. There aren’t many goalies in the NHL today with Stanley Cup rings as starters. Jean-Sebastien Giguere, Cam Ward, Nikolai Khabibulin, Dominik Hasek, and Martin Brodeur are the only other active goalies to backstop a team to a Stanley Cup.

But when it comes to Chris Osgood, I don’t think it’s ever been about his numbers. It’s been about people’s perception of him. Osgood is known as a guy that gives up soft goals.

A classic example of this is Game Five of the 1998 Western Conference Final against Dallas. In overtime, Ozzie let in a Jamie Langenbrunner shot from centre ice. This had the potential to be disastrous for the Wings, but they rallied and won Game Six—propelling them to the Stanley Cup Final for a second straight year.

Many people forget that Osgood stopped 26 shots for a shutout in that game.

There are also people that will argue that his win total and other statistics have been inflated by the teams that played in front of him. The Wings teams of the late 1990s and early 2000s were almost always in contention for the Stanley Cup. With such a good team playing in front of him, it makes sense that he would get a lot of wins.

But to say that the Wings won in spite of Osgood would be a mistake. Osgood was an important part of many of those teams and the Wings would not have been as successful without him.

Other critics will point to the fact that the only major award Osgood has won is the Jennings Trophy, which he shared with Mike Vernon in 1996 and he has never had a 40 win season. He was the runner-up to Jim Carey in 1996 for the Vezina Trophy but has never won the award.

But what it will come down to is whether or not people can say the phrase “Chris Osgood, Hockey Hall of Famer.” It definitely doesn’t sound as natural as saying “Dominik Hasek, Hall of Famer” or “Martin Brodeur, Hall of Famer.”

Personally, I would like to see Chris Osgood in the Hockey Hall of Fame. He has been a good player for a long time. Maybe not a great player, but there have been a few questionable inductees before. He definitely has the stats to back up a Hall of Fame induction.

In the end, it will be about perception, as it most often is.