Joe Thornton is headed to the Hockey Hall of Fame, where he belongs.<\/p>\n
And two of his San Jose Sharks teammates, Rob Blake and Jeremy Roenick, will be there to greet him.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo know Jumbo is to love Jumbo,\u201d Roenick said.<\/p>\n
It takes a Hall of Famer to know a Hall of Famer, so who better than Blake \u201814 and Roenick \u201824 to tell stories, both bawdy and insightful, about why Thornton is Hall of Fame material, on and off the ice.<\/p>\n
\u201cJumbo\u201d<\/p>\n
The 6-foot-4 Thornton was nicknamed \u201cJumbo\u201d for good reason.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe had that rare combination of that hockey sense with his vision and his size,\u201d Blake, who played with Thornton from 2008 to 2010, said. \u201c[Wayne Gretzky] is head and shoulders above everybody [as a playmaker], but he wasn\u2019t as big as [Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr], right? They\u2019re big, they had this long reach, they had the hockey IQ to be able to make these high-end plays, and never panicked with the puck.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lemieux, Jagr, Thornton. That\u2019s some lofty praise.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s not many like that,\u201d Blake said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joe Thornton is headed to the Hockey Hall of Fame, where he belongs. And two of his San…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":370626,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[1322,12538,178652,118971,293,178653,1328,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-370625","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-featured","9":"tag-hockey-hall-of-fame","10":"tag-jeremy-roenick","11":"tag-joe-thornton","12":"tag-nhl","13":"tag-rob-blake","14":"tag-san-jose-sharks","15":"tag-sports","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115528874288225170","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370625\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/370626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}