Mogilny finally receives 'overdue' call for Hall of Fame selection

TORONTO -- Alexander Mogilny was in a deep sleep when the phone rang in the middle of the Russian night.

It was a call almost two decades in the making.

As the 56-year-old woozily answered, the voice on the other end of the line was Ron Francis, the former NHL great who now serves as the Chair of the Hockey Hall of Fame Selection Committee. The message to Mogilny, who is currently president of his hometown team of Amur Khabarovsk of the Kontinental Hockey League: Congratulations on being elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Francis didn't use the word “finally.” He probably should have.

Mogilny’s reaction did not include any whooping, any jumping for joy, any screams of jubilation. In this, his 17th year of eligibility for selection, after being overlooked time after time after time, there understandably was just a respectable acknowledgement.

“I am happy to be part of a great organization like the Hockey Hall of Fame," Mogilny said. "I want to thank both my Russian and NHL teammates for helping me achieve this honor.”

Francis mentioned the 2003-04 season, when he played the final 12 games of his own Hall of Fame career with Mogilny and the Toronto Maple Leafs. He’d presented Mogilny with a special bottle of wine at that time, and now wondered if his former teammate, if he still had it, would open it in celebration.

“It’s 3 a.m. in the morning here,” Mogilny replied.

Shortly afterwards he was snoozing again, thereby making him unavailable for the Hall’s media conference call with all the selections for the Class of 2025.

After all that time waiting, who could blame him for wanting to get some extra shut-eye?

Certainly not Hall of Fame goaltender Martin Brodeur, Mogilny’s teammate with the 2000 New Jersey Devils Stanley Cup-winning team.

“I have a smile on my face at hearing this news about Alex finally getting in,” Brodeur told NHL.com from his St. Louis-area home. “I mean, it’s so long overdue for someone who so deserves to be in the Hall.

“But, I mean, what the heck took so long?”

It’s a question players and former players, media and fans, lovers of the game, have asked for years.

Moligny, who has been eligible for induction since 2009, had the combination of statistics and flair that made him one of the most memorable on-ice performers of a generation in a career that spanned from 1989-2006. To that end, he had one of the greatest goal-scoring seasons in NHL history in 1992-93 with 76 as a member of the Buffalo Sabres, trailing only Wayne Gretzky of the Edmonton Oilers (92 in 1981-82; 87 in 1983-84), Brett Hull of the St. Louis Blues (86 in 1990-91) and Mario Lemieux of the Pittsburgh Penguins (85 in 1988-89).

When all was said and done, Mogilny had 1,032 points (473 goals, 559 assists) in 990 games for the Sabres, Vancouver Canucks, Devils and Maple Leafs. He won the Stanley Cup with Brodeur and the Devils in 1999-2000 and gold with the Soviet Union at the 1988 Calgary Olympics and the 1989 World Championship, making him a member of the IIHF Triple Gold Club.

In the process, he did it with pizzazz.

“He was a game-changer,” Brodeur said. “He saw the game like very few people. And when he had a chance, he made it count. As both a teammate and an opposing goalie, one of the things that stood out was that he never missed the net. He took advantage.

“He was such a great teammate too. I remember he always left his stick in the same place. He was on a 13-game (point streak) and one day the trainer stepped on his stick and accidentally broke it. Some superstitious guys would have gotten angry. He just laughed it off. That was Alex.

“So happy for him.”

Upon further review, Mogilny will always be linked with Pavel Bure and Sergei Fedorov, his famed linemates with the Soviet Union junior national team.

Bure was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2012 with 779 points (437 goals, 342 assists) in 702 NHL games, 288 fewer games than Mogilny.

Fedorov was inducted in 2015 with 1,179 points (483 goals, 696 assists) in 1,248 games, a rate of 0.95 points per game for his career. Mogilny’s career points per game rate was significantly better at 1.04.

And now, ten years after Fedorov’s induction, Mogilny will join his two junior teammates in the Hall as part of a prestigious Class of 2025 that also includes Zdeno Chara, Joe Thornton, Duncan Keith, Jennifer Botterill and Brianna Decker in the players’ category, and Jack Parker and Daniele Sauvageau in the builders’ category.

Beyond the analytics pages, there were and continue to be very few players who can bring fans out of their seats each and every time they touch the puck, the anticipation always there that something special might happen. It is one of the intangibles of a Hall of Famer. And it’s a trait Keith remembers in Mogilny.

“As far as Alex, I grew up watching Alex,” Keith recalled. “I remember going to Vancouver Canucks games and watching him and seeing how fast he was and the amazing speed.

“I was sitting up in the nosebleed section and he stood out with his speed and his skill. I can remember it very clearly how good he was in person. You see it on TV but it was another level being able to witness that in person.

“It is a huge honor to be inducted with everybody and Alex is one of those guys. I think he’s probably happy he’s inducted now, finally, and it’s an especially cool honor to go in with him.”

Not just because of Mogilny’s on-ice exploits, either. Indeed, off the ice he helped pave the way for Russian players like Bure and Fedorov to come to the NHL.

The Sabres had used a fifth-round pick (No. 89) in the 1988 NHL Draft on the speedy wing. He subsequently became the first Soviet player to defect to the NHL in 1989, the incident occurring while the IIHF World Championships were taking place in Sweden.

Fifteen years later, Mogilny was back in Stockholm in 2004 for Maple Leafs training camp and a pair of exhibition games against Swedish club teams at Globen Arena, now known as Avicii Arena. At one point, during a 1-on-1 interview we were having, he pointed at an arena door and said that was where he escaped as part of his defection.

It was, looking back, a part of hockey history.

Just like it was Tuesday when the Hockey Hall of Fame finally opened its own fabled doors to him.