What was the best team in NHL history without a single Hall-of-Fame player?

Today’s time-waster is a simple one: What’s the best team in history that didn’t have a single Hall-of-Fame player on the roster?

A few of you have sent in variations of the question over the years, and it’s a good one. Nice and easy. I’m not even sure we need the traditional bullet-point ground rules.

We’ll do this by decade, more or less, going back to the first expansion. For more recent teams, we’ll obviously have to use some judgment and common sense over who might make the Hall some day. The 2017-18 Capitals don’t have a single Hall-of-Famer right now, but I have a feeling that Ovechkin guy might get in eventually, so we won’t count them. That challenge will get easier as we work back, but never completely go away, since the committee sometimes drops a decades-old selection on us, seemingly out of nowhere. But we’ll do our best, and maybe check in old pal Paul Pidutti and his Adjusted Hockey model for a sanity check when we need it.

With that in mind, let’s give this a shot. We’ll start in the 2010s and work our way back.

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