1972. He was inducted into Canada's Sports Hall of Fame as a builder for ice hockey in 1973. Bauer was posthumously inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in the builder category in 1989, the Olympic Hall of Fame in 1992, the UBC Sports Hall of Fame in the builder category in 1996, the IIHF Hall of Fame in the builder category in 1997, the BC Hockey Hall of Fame in 2009, and the Ontario Sports Hall of Fame in 2012. Legacy The Canadian Press described Bauer as, "The kindly Roman Catholic priest who brought a reluctant Canadian hockey fraternity into the modern age of international play with his concept of a national team". Canada's national team was called "the most nobly conceived of all Canadian hockey enterprises" in the book Hockey Is Our Game by Jim Coleman. Bauer was "an inspirational coach, a caring educator, a master motivator" and "devoted to the concept that education and hockey could mix", according to Kevin Shea of The Hockey Hall of Fame. Brian Conacher stated that, "Father Bauer, in many respects, was a visionary, a pioneer in recognizing how good European hockey had become. It became evident that the Canadian style — rough and tumble, we'll beat them in the alley if we can’t beat them on the rink type of attitude — was passé". Rick Noonan stated, "The fact that father was a Basilian priest, he used to worry about that a lot, that people would misinterpret that he was trying to turn everyone into a Catholic. But really, he was very ecumenical. Should a player take the Lord's name in vain in the heat of the moment during a game, he would find a gentle hand on his shoulder: "Now, now, I do the praying around here". Tom Watt who was an assistant coach for the national team stated, "Father Bauer is a great Canadian, but I could never get it straight — sometimes when you thought you were talking about hockey, the priest came out of him and sometimes when you thought you were talking to a priest the hockey came out of him". Bauer is the namesake of two hockey arenas, including the Father Bauer Arena which opened in 1963 at the University of British Columbia, and the Father David Bauer Olympic Arena in Calgary which was named for him in 1986 and served as a training facility