Finally inducting Mogilny, Hockey Hall of Fame rights one of its longest wrongs
He’s no longer the answer to one of hockey’s most popular barroom debates.
Who is the Hockey Hall of Fame’s No. 1 snub?
The likes of Curtis Joseph, John LeClair and Rod Brind’Amour have earned love in the discussions over the years, sure. But Alexander Mogilny stood in a class of his own.
Until Tuesday afternoon when, in his 17th year of eligibility, Selection Committee Chair Ron Francis read Mogilny’s name. Mogilny, 56, joins a loaded Class of 2025. Also inducted in the player category: Jennifer Botterill, Zdeno Chara, Brianna Decker, Duncan Keith and Joe Thornton.
“I am happy to be part of a great organization like the Hockey Hall of Fame,” Mogilny said in the Hall’s official release. “I want to thank both my Russian and NHL teammates for helping me achieve this honor.”
Chara, Decker, Keith and Thornton, having wrapped up their highly decorated careers just a few seasons ago, were first-ballot inductees. Botterill had to wait a dozen years to hear her name called. But Mogilny went so long without being inducted that it was fair to wonder if it would ever happen. Mogilny wasn’t present on the media call Tuesday following the announcement, but outgoing chair Lanny McDonald said Tuesday that he “felt like Santa Claus” calling Mogilny, who answered his phone overseas at 3:00 a.m. to take the call.
What made Mogilny such a compelling induction case all these years – Daily Faceoff writer and hockey historian Paul Pidutti called him the No. 1 omission leading up to Tuesday – was that Mogilny had a strong case from more than one angle.
On the ice, he was a legendarily elite player, blessed with dazzling hands, a laser of a shot and a dead-eyed, shoulder-shrugging swagger reminiscent of Nikita Kucherov today. Mogilny scored 76 goals in just 77 games in the 1992-93 season; only Wayne Gretzky, Brett Hull and Mario Lemieux have potted more in a single campaign. Mogilny wasn’t a shooting star burning brightly but briefly, either. He topped 100 points and 50 goals twice, the second time for each coming as a Vancouver Canuck. He buried at least 30 goals eight times. He racked up 1,032 points in 990 games. He played the final two thirds of his career during the NHL’s darkest era for offense.
“I grew up watching Alex, and I still remember going to Vancouver Canucks games and watching him and seeing how fast he was, the amazing speed,” said fellow 2025 inductee Keith on the call Tuesday. “I was sitting up in the nosebleed section, and he still stood out. I can remember it very clearly just how good he was in person. You see it on TV, but it was another level to witness that in person.”
As my colleague Pidutti has noted, Mogilny’s era-adjusted numbers would’ve lifted him slightly from totals of 473-559-1,032 to 480-574-1,054. He’s also part of the Quadruple Gold Club, having won a Stanley Cup, Olympic gold, World Championship gold and World Junior gold. He bagged a late-career Lady Byng Trophy as the NHL’s most gentlemanly player, to boot.
But Mogilny’s career was just as impactful off the ice as on it. As a teenager in the Soviet Union when the Iron Curtain was intact, he was an iconic member of the CSKA Moscow Red Army team, forming a legendary line with Sergei Fedorov and Pavel Bure. The Buffalo Sabres had selected Mogilny 89th overall in the 1988 NHL Draft, and he wanted to embark on a career there, so he took matters into his own hands. He had met Don Luce, Buffalo’s director of player development, at the 1989 World Juniors, where Luce told him he could help him defect from the Soviet Union. They made it happen after the Soviets’ victory in Stockholm at the 1989 World Championship. They had been given a day off to go shopping as a reward, which provided the window to smuggle Mogilny out of Sweden. Luce, Sabres GM Gerry Meehan and Mogilny were on the run for several days, constantly hotel hopping, trying to evade the KGB as they waited clearance for Mogilny to fly to the United States. They pulled it off, and hockey was never the same.
Mogilny was the first successful Soviet defector and far from the last. In the years that followed, the likes of Bure and, of course, the Russian Five – Sergei Fedorov, Vladimir Konstantinov, Slava Kozlov, Slava Fetisov, and Igor Larionov – walked down Mogilny’s path. The NHL received a massive influx of high-end star talent in the early 1990s. The USSR fell by 1991 and the dam was broken, but Mogilny started the exodus well before then.
As the sport continues to justifiably freeze out Russia from international competition for its invasion of Ukraine, it feels fitting to see the Hall of Fame honor the first player to push back against the nation’s tyranny by escaping it.