OUR RULES

From the outset, we were out to change some rules and maintain some consistency. We merged the voting rules of baseball's hall of fame with hockey's culture, trying to keep hockey's unique Canadian flavour, while recognizing that the sport is international. Voters were given five votes each in the Honoured Players and Oldtimers category; three in the other categories.

Like the baseball hall of fame, a player had to wait five years before being qualified for election. There were no exceptions, even in the tragic cases of Terry Sawchuk and Tim Horton.

Like the baseball hall of fame, a candidate had to garner 75% of the votes for election, which usually meant 15 of the 20 votes.

Like baseball's modern qualification rules, a player had 15 chances to be elected as an Honoured Member, before he was given a second chance as an Oldtimer.

And one rule we added as went along: anyone with less than four votes was dropped from the next ballot. Some of our ballots were quite hefty, and this mechanism thinned them out, although anyone from the committee was free to nominate anyone they chose at any time.

Not all the committee members were happy with these predetermined decisions.

Keith Lenn had proposed we just run down a list of players and voted yes or no for their inclusion. Lenn said, "While the actual voting process may not have been what I would consider ideal for this exercise, it was fair nonetheless because we stuck to the rules. Again, I believe that a 'yes/no' approach would have served our committee better and inducted players in a more timely fashion, preventing the logjams that occurred due to the finite numbers of players/builders/contributors, etc. that we could select in each round."

Long-time Flyers fan Howard Rosenthal desired to see us take baseball's weighted-scale approach, awarding five-point for a first-place vote, three for a second-place and one for a third-place vote. It should also be noted the NHL uses the weighted method when determining its awards at the end of the season.

Rosenthal said, "My only criticism of the process is that there was no weighted voting, so that a voter's first- and fifth-place choices counted equally and a sixth-place choice did not count at all. I think that weighted voting would have allowed a more accurate evaluation in each individual election, although I don't know how much difference it would have made in which nominees were elected over the course of 60 elections."