Insert your own Brett Hull pun

OK, OK so it’s old news now but for those of you who happen to have been visiting some distant planet for the last couple of days:

Brett Hull has been inducted into the Hockey Hall Of Fame.

Not a bad player was he?

There are loads of stories out there in the hockey world relating to this so I’ll keep it brief and offer you all my own take on “The Golden Brett” (nah; I never got the hang of that moniker either).

Brett Hull scored one or two goals during a 19 year NHL career that saw him take in stints in Calgary, St Louis, Dallas, Detroit and Phoenix, won a few personal awards too and the occasional All-Star game here and there.

Yeah he was not a bad player at all.

You always get the feeling from Hull though that he didn’t want to be remembered as a hockey great in the same vein as his Father or a Gordie Howe or a Maurice Richard… etc. He just wanted to be a guy who happened to play hockey and enjoyed it.

I will always be eternally grateful to Brett Hull for the Game 6 match and series winner against the Buffalo Sabres to clinch the Stars’ franchises first Stanley Cup – on a goal that is STILL contested to this day! Seriously. Ten years. Go figure.

I will always be grateful to him for his playing ability. Perhaps not so much his skating but he could score from anywhere on the ice.

I will always be grateful to him for choosing to return to Dallas in an executive role after his 2005 retirement.

I will never forgive him for becoming a Red Wing.

Brett Hull may have been a little flawed in his attributes but ladies and gentlemen, we are ultimately talking about the third-highest goal scorer of all time here and regardless of who he played for, I will quite simply always be grateful for Brett Hull being the player he was.

Some may argue this is the most important part but – this is still the guy I’d rather go for a beer with over most of the current NHL crop.

Just a guy who happened to play hockey. Only really, really, really well.