I don’t know about you, but I feel that maybe, just maybe, they may have jumped the gun a tad on this one.

The 35-pog mini-set starts off well-enough featuring a series of “Legends” including… what’s that you say? You don’t know what a “pog” is? Well, pull up a chair, young lad, and let me tell you a tale.

Pogs were one of the biggest fads of the mid-1990s. Just ask Bart’s best friend Milhouse:

That Milhouse… Did you know he actually acquired said pogs by trading Bart’s soul to Comic Book Guy? That is how popular those things were for a very brief time: people used to risk eternal damnation for these little cardboard disks.

Full disclosure: I never actually played with pogs when I was a kid, mostly because I preferred collecting hockey cards. From what I remember, collecting them is what most people did with their pogs too; they never played with them at all. Pogs were actually some sort of game, which I think had something to do with kids stacking them up and then smashing them with something called, I don’t know, let’s say a “smasher” and then they flew everywhere, and I supposed hilarity ensued. I think you were allowed to take the pogs that hit the pavement and then use them to buy other kids’ souls, but I’ll have to look into that. Anyway, that’s my absolutely not-researched history of pogs. Hope you enjoyed it. Now onto this induction…

Of course, anytime something becomes popular for even the briefest of times, you can bet every two-bit TV show, movie franchise, and rock star will try to cash in, and the NHL was no different, giving the thumbs up to a whole whack of pogs including the 1995-96 Canada Games insert set.

As I was saying earlier, this 35-pog mini set featured the likes of NHL “Legends” like Ray Bourque, Wayne Gretzky, and Mario Lemieux. You see, that works because those guys were then, and still are, bona fide NHL legends.

Then there were the “All-Star” pogs, which included Eric Lindros, Mark Messier, Paul Coffey, Grant Fuhr. Great, no problem there.

Now, imagine you’re going through a bunch of these cardboard coins, and all you find are those with Messier, Gretzky, Bourque, etc., and all of a sudden you come across this…

Remember that song, “One of These Things is Not Like the Other”? Start singing that right about now, except it’s not just one thing that is not like the others; oh, no, there are more than a few, ahem, “Future Hall of Famers” in this set. Remember when David Oliver made it to the Hall a few years ago? No? How about Kyle McLaren? Still no? Ok, then you must remember Jeff Friesen, or Jim Carey, or Kenny Jonsson’s inductions? You don’t? Well, that’s probably because (surprise, surprise) none of them were even remotely considered for induction.

That’s the problem when you start labelling players one year into their careers. Once upon a time, Rick Hampton and Greg Joly were tabbed as the “next Bobby Orr,” and well… that didn’t quite turn out for various reasons. Not that they weren’t good hockey players. It’s just that you can’t start heaping that kind of pressure on a kid just a few months into his NHL career.

For all those reasons, we are proud to induct this entire set, which has proven itself as being 150% crapworthy, into the Hockey Hall of Shame.