Welcome to LWOS Hockey’s summer series, Call to the Hall, where we take a look at the next great player from each NHL franchise to get called to the Hockey Hall of Fame. There are a few caveats, the player must be active, and must have played 300 games (or 150 for goaltenders) with the franchise.
Check out the previous Call to the Hall articles HERE.
Call to the Hall: Dallas Stars
For this series especially, and the quantity of young talent resting in the Dallas Stars organization, it makes it difficult to pick out just one player who has the Hall of Fame potential.
It came down to multiple players that produced a “wow factor” in Dallas and across the league in perhaps their breakout seasons. That lead to the decision to choose captain Jamie Benn. It’s not hard to guess the other superstar, young Tyler Seguin, who has seen his career take off in the Lonestar State.
Jamie Benn
At just 26, Benn will enter next season with six years of experience under his belt. The Stars obviously saw something special in Benn, who scored 42 goals in his draft year playing in the BCHL for the Victoria Grizzlies. That 2006-07 season saw him get selected in the 5th round. After at two-year stint in the OHL playing for the Kelowna Rockets that saw the future superstar put up 79 goals and 147 points in 107 games, the Stars captain put on the NHL jersey for the first time in the ’09-10 season. That year saw him score 22 goals and 41 points in a full 82-game slate.
The next two seasons saw Benn get better and better with age. 2010-11 saw him score 22 goals again but his point total rose to 56 in 69 games played. The following year, the then-22-year old potted 26 more goals to go along with 63 points in 71 games.
The NHL Lockout limited Benn’s 2013 season to 41 games played but he was still on pace for his career totals up to that point, scoring 12 goals and 33 points. In September of that year, Benn was named the sixth captain in franchise history with Brenden Morrow getting traded.
Each of the past two seasons have seen the British Columbian place ninth in the league in goals scored. Benn finished with 34 goals in ’13-14 and 35 goals ’14-15 respectively, second only to Seguin in terms of goal-scoring on the Stars. Giving Benn the “C” seems to be a good investment so far.
However, Benn has also tallied large numbers in the assists category with a career high of 52 this past season, good enough for sixth in the league.
That meant 87 total points scored in ’14-15, which led the league and earned him his first Art Ross trophy. Benn used a hat trick plus an assist to pass Islanders captain John Tavares for the lead in the final game of the season. That includes scoring 15 points in the final six games. All of this playing through a hip injury that needed surgery at the end of the season.
It will be interesting to see if Benn can inevitably one-up him self in the top three categories for the third straight season. Regardless, he has been nothing short of impressive up to this point, looking like a solid Hockey Hall of Fame candidate for some point in the future from the Big D.
Main Photo:
Stats courtesy of HockeyDB
