Hall of Not Bad, Volume 10: Art Vandelay (and Brandt Fuhr!)

[Gustav 6,481]

"...the most wins out of any goalie not in the Hall of Fame and the only player (so far) to ever break 300 wins and not get in."

-Me referring to Alexander Pepper in HoNB #1

 

"Vandelay was the face of the franchise for most of his career, and similarly to Cooke, spent it all with Los Angeles. In S90, they managed to set their career high in wins with 45 and were it not for surefire Hall of Famer Lachlan Summers, they would likely have had a shot at earning themselves some individual hardware."

-@sadie, VSN Presents: The Longest Cup Droughts and When They Started

 

"Art Vandelay"

-everyone

 

 

 

 

Imagine, if you will, a world where your team's goaltender records eight seasons above a .920 SV%. Imagine a little bit harder that the same player breaks the VHL's holy 300-win mark while leading your team out of a rebuild and into six consecutive playoff appearances. Also imagine that he shatters virtually all of your franchise records at his position, has his number retired, is in the conversation for league MVP twice, and is instantly known  by name around the league. If you were a GM in need of lots of future star power, that seems like a very good place to start as you attempt to build your team all the way from the ground up.

 

It is not enough for the Board of Gustav to even consider you for induction into the Hall of Fame. I knew that my player, Art Vandelay, was never on the ballot, but I found it interesting that there wasn't even a single search result for his name in the voting section of the forum. I'm going to deviate a little from my usual HoNB format and say right up top that I don't dispute this point--Art Vandelay is not a Hall of Famer. But we're still talking about someone who recorded the 10th-most wins of all time, more than any other player created in my entire time in the VHL. We also have all that face of the franchise stuff I just mentioned. Plus, it's my own player and I get to write about him, so that's what I'm going to do. 

 

In my opinion, again, Vandelay is not a Hall of Famer. That said, I think it's worthwhile to put him into the HoNB anyway. We're going to ask not "is Vandelay a Hall of Fame player," but "why is Vandelay not a Hall of Fame player," because the answer to that question is a massively interesting documentation of a fascinating part of VHL history. 

 

There are surprisingly way more players than this that would be possible uses for this article, but I think the most fair list would be:

 

Jesse Teno: a Hall of Fame player. Teno was a first-gen from S85 who spent an entire career with London. First-gen picks are always risky, but it's very safe to say that this one paid off--winning the Shaw in S91 and the Cup in S88, Teno made manager @Aimee  proud in showing off both regular- and post-season success.

 

Clueless Wallob: NOT a Hall of Fame player. The last player created by @DMaximus, Wallob was a promising vet who lived up to his earning potential, breaking 1500 TPE and earning a Shaw of his own in S89 after a move from Prague to Moscow. After that, he would play for three more teams, not necessarily making it into the conversation of the league's top goaltenders but providing a reliable starting piece across the league.

 

Brandt Fuhr: NOT a Hall of Fame player. Fuhr is arguably the closest comparison to Vandelay, being the only other goaltender in league history to play nine seasons. In fact, that's the reason why I've put him in the title as well. The label that's attached to both of these players can't be attached to any other player, ever, and there's something in that. Fuhr was picked 2nd overall by Vancouver and spent eight of those nine seasons there, moving to New York for a relatively unseen final campaign. Interestingly, the general consensus around the league was that he was on a HoF trajectory early on in his career, with a Cup and a Kanou four seasons in and a Shaw campaign the season after that where he won 44 games with a .931 SV%. Activity and performance declined later on in his career, though, and @Tate and Fuhr crept across the finish line with less than 700 TPE and questions of what could have been.

 

Cole Pearce: NOT a Hall of Fame player. Pearce was one of the first goaltenders of the E era to go straight to the VHL, being drafted by London in a bizarre S82 where he would record 40 wins despite a GAA of 3.61. By S86, he'd put up the league's lowest GAA with Chicago, and there would be a handful of very solid performances with various teams otherwise. @N0HBDY retired Pearce before his ninth season hit, keeping the number of players who have made a truly full career in net limited.

 

 

Let's get into some of the numbers, and it will start to become clear where the differences lie between our players.

 

 

You've heard me talk a lot about wins, and everything about Vandelay's career total as compared to other non-HoFers is objectively true. That becomes deceptive to some extent when we consider that the S80s were the first time that 9-season careers were possible. Vandelay with just his first 8 seasons has 264 wins--below Pearce's 8-season total and very comparable to the rest of the list. I think it's absolutely worth noting that Vandelay deserves credit for putting up his career total. After all, it is more wins than most others have ever put up. It also beats Fuhr--only two players have ever gone nine full seasons in net, and Vandelay came away with more wins. But it becomes clear that the high total is purely reflective of a high total. It doesn't erase the meaning that Vandelay put up numbers and gave his team a chance for a longer time, but it does mean that it doesn't necessarily mean that he played more dominantly.

 

 

 

For those of you who don't know what normalizing is, I've explained it in my other articles. But since it's been 11 months since the last HoNB, I'll do it again--0.00 represents Vandelay's career total, and everything else is relative to that. For example, a -0.01 means that someone was .01 below Vandelay's total (i.e., recorded a .915). Vandelay is 20th overall in career SV%, and he moves up to 16th all-time when we leave out four players with considerably lower games played. Those also seem like HoF numbers--after all, it's not all the time we see those numbers. Unless, of course, it's the S80s. Vandelay again finishes just a little bit above Fuhr, which is great, but he's below Wallob, who suffered the single worst season of the whole group, and barely overlaps with Teno before either of those players hit their prime. I include the individual seasons here as well so we can break it down better--HoNB #3 makes a case for Jakab Holik on the basis that an awful rookie season negatively influenced all of his career totals--but we can't do that with Vandelay here, who's actually remarkably consistent across the board.

 

This extends beyond just our list. Google Sheets is stupid and doesn't let me put a legend directly on this graph (that I know of), but I'll explain:

 

 

Hall of Fame players and Vandelay are labeled pretty clearly. The others in a lighter red are non-HoF players who played in other, similarly weird eras--one player from S3 and one from S49, times when numbers all over the league were crazy in general. The players in blue? All of them are S80s goaltenders. They might be recognizable to you, too--Augustus Kennedy, Matt Murdock, Boris Tsezar, Ash Sparks, Bubbles Utonium, Dusty Wilson, and Henry Tucker Jr are all on this chart, and in terms of career averages, Vandelay is just one of them. Of course, there were others in the S80s who don't make the list. Vandelay was by no means a bad player, it's just that he wasn't alone. And the S80s were evil.

 

 

 

 

GAA is Vandelay's stronger career-average stat. Look up on the top and you see that he's second-lowest (although with a clear gap between his line and Teno's). Look at the individual graph and you'll see a cool feature of these individual graphs--more bars are above average than below average. So, the average season from someone on our list had a higher GAA than Vandelay's average. We see a few other things worth looking at--based on this stat, we can probably justify making Vandelay our primary subject over Fuhr. Vandelay is also remarkably consistent in this matter--three of our four comparisons have both a better best season and a worse worst season, despite Vandelay playing for both notably good and bad teams. This stat isn't horribly warped by the S80s, thankfully, so it's nice that I get to say that he beat a lot of other players in ways that we can't just attribute to the era.

 

We can skip the discussion about playoffs, I think, because Vandelay was always mediocre in the playoffs. My players like to do great in the playoffs, but for some reason he just didn't show up. Art Vandelay is not a Hall of Fame player.

 

 

I had always intended to write a HoNB article for Vandelay, just because he was my own player. I had always known that he was the winningest player outside the Hall of Fame, that this was strongly influenced by the S80s being what they were, and that he had interesting numbers that weren't fit for induction for era-related reasons. I did not know that I only had Fuhr to compare him to if I wanted 9-season careers, and I also didn't know just how swamped I was in the all-time list in some categories. Vandelay does deserve recognition for his career, and he did quite a bit that we can't claim to be exactly replicated until someone else comes around and decides to give 9 seasons a go. It's just also fair that the Hall of Fame might not be the best place to do it. The S80s were one of the most unique statistical nightmares that we've ever seen in the VHL, and I hope we don't end up with anything similar to it in the future. I played as a goaltender for as long as I possibly could have, and over that time I watched my player put up real, legitimate Hall of Fame numbers. The problem? So did everyone else.

 

Art Vandelay has never made a Hall of Fame ballot and never will. It's likely that he's the answer to a few good trivia questions, and was unquestionably a player that could cause trouble for other teams. Not bad, perhaps.

 

 

Previous HoNB articles:

Volume 1: Alexander Pepper

Volume 2: Shawn Glade

Volume 3: Jakab Holik

Volume 4: Bo Boeser

Volume 5: Tyson Kohler

Volume 6: Lasse Milo

Volume 7: Voittu Jannula

Volume 8: Brendan Telker

Volume 9: Skylar Rift

[Ahma 1,452]

Art Vandeley

[N0HBDY 1,140]

Should I have played a Pearce for that 9th season, on Seattle for whatever season that would’ve been, would that have helped his case despite the lack of hardware? 
 

Just a little discussion since I didn’t see him having more than a mid career other than racking up wins off of the late stages of the meta phase and boasting one trophy by default winning not committee

[jacobcarson877 2,578]

Art Vandelay

[jacobcarson877 2,578]

Every time I read one of these it reminds me how close Wolanin was, but I also remind myself of that like once a week playing with the Statistics table

[Gustav 6,481]

52 minutes ago, jacobcarson877 said:

Every time I read one of these it reminds me how close Wolanin was, but I also remind myself of that like once a week playing with the Statistics table

 

Sounds like a future installment if I ever get to it 

 

Also Art Vandelay

[Victor 11,043]

21 hours ago, N0HBDY said:

Should I have played a Pearce for that 9th season, on Seattle for whatever season that would’ve been, would that have helped his case despite the lack of hardware? 
 

Just a little discussion since I didn’t see him having more than a mid career other than racking up wins off of the late stages of the meta phase and boasting one trophy by default winning not committee

I don't think so, any of these goalies needed a solid 2-3 season run of being the best to stand out so no one was 1 season away.

[Daniel Janser 2,223]

On 1/6/2025 at 6:35 PM, jacobcarson877 said:

Every time I read one of these it reminds me how close Wolanin was, but I also remind myself of that like once a week playing with the Statistics table

LANDON WOLANIN the winger who massively contributed to DJ's HOF career (and could have gotten the Chershenko's all time record for GWG if he could have stayed in CGY his whole career)....

[Victor 11,043]

5 hours ago, Daniel Janser said:

LANDON WOLANIN the winger who massively contributed to DJ's HOF career (and could have gotten the Chershenko's all time record for GWG if he could have stayed in CGY his whole career)....

Imagine needing to spend a whole career in Calgary to hold the record. 

[Daniel Janser 2,223]

9 minutes ago, Victor said:

Imagine needing to spend a whole career in Calgary to hold the record. 

Well it looks like there was more scoring going around in the the late 20s early 30s then in the post-meta era...

[Victor 11,043]

9 hours ago, Daniel Janser said:

Well it looks like there was more scoring going around in the the late 20s early 30s then in the post-meta era...

Lies and excuses 

[JCarson 767]

Without even reading this article I know a few things just by looking at who the author is

1) it will be long

2) there will be stats

3) it will be done well.

 

Okay now that i have gone and read the article I am more convinced of my 3 notes above.  You can tell that the author knew the material, did their research and was passionate about the topic.  The fact that it was their own player may help in that but as noted this is only 1 of a number of similar articles.  I look forward to the next installment, who knows who that will be.  

 

This article deserves a 10/10.