Canuck flavour to 2016 class of B.C. Sports Hall of Fame
VANCOUVER — Murray Baron has only one real regret about a National Hockey League playing career that lasted 15 seasons.
He wishes he’d squeezed another dozen games out of it.
Baron retired in 2004 having played 988 NHL games and acknowledged Monday that in recent years the fact he didn’t quite make it to 1,000 has bothered him.
“I should have tried to stick around a bit longer,” Barron said after he was named as one of six 2016 inductees to the B.C. Hockey Hall of Fame. “That’s a regret, but there’s nothing you can do about it now.”
Barron, who was born in Prince George and raised in Kamloops, is proud of the career he did carve out in the NHL as a dependable, stay-at-home defenceman.
“Even making the league was an accomplishment,” Baron said. “I was an eighth-round draft pick and played house-league hockey up until midget, so I am definitely proud of the career I had.”
Barron had 35 goals, 129 points and 1,309 penalty minutes in his NHL career.
“I definitely wasn’t a pointgetter, you know that,” said the man his teammates called Bear.
Baron spent five seasons with the Canucks, from 1997-98 through 2002-03. He is entering the B.C. Hockey Hall of Fame with three other new inductees who have Canuck connections.
Former Vancouver teammate Brendan Morrison, longtime Canucks equipment manager Pat O’Neil and former Canucks defenceman and current B.C. Hockey League commissioner John Grisdale will also be inducted at a July 22 ceremony in Penticton, along with longtime Merritt hockey supporter Brian Barrett.
The 1998-99 Vernon Vipers team, winners of RBC Cup-Canadian Junior A championship, is the other B.C. Hockey Hall of Fame inductee for 2016.
“When I got here we struggled,” Baron said of his stint with the Canucks. “But we improved each year and to be part of Nazzie [Markus Naslund], Bert [Todd Bertuzzi] and Mo [Morrison] when they were flying was nice. We had some good teams.”
Now 48, Baron settled in Phoenix after retiring, but is back living in Kamloops with his wife and two sons. He still owns a Kamloops nightclub, but has sold the pub he once owned.