Twenty years later, Gretzky deal still resonates throughout hockey
Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings all reported the stunning piece of news on their broadcasts that night.
ESPN made it the lead story, while the Los Angeles Times slotted it for their front page.
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| Gretzky's trade from the Oilers to Los Angeles had a huge impact in the United States. (Getty Images) |
What was less apparent at the time, though, was just how much of an impact it would have for the NHL and at the amateur level throughout the United States over the next 20 years.
"It certainly turned out to be a defining moment for hockey in this country," said American-born Atlanta Thrashers GM Don Waddell. "It paved the way for markets no one would have thought of and helped create an entire generation of quality American players, many who are starting to come from those new areas."
Gretzky was 27 when he was traded to the Kings by the Edmonton Oilers. The move came about two weeks after he had been married in what was seen as a royal wedding in Canada and only a few months after Gretzky won the playoff most valuable player award and his fourth Stanley Cup in five seasons. And it was a blockbuster, landing the cash-strapped Oilers $15 million along with two young players and three first-round draft picks. Still, it created such a sense of national shock in Canada, there were calls for parliamentary action to block it.
The Great One was at the peak of a career widely considered the best ever, with eight scoring titles, seven MVPs and dozens of likely unbreakable records set in his first nine seasons. By then Gretzky was an indisputable icon, and one who transcended the sport to such a degree that he became the first athlete to have his face on the Campbell's soup can soon after he got to the Kings.
It meant that Gretzky's unique star power could give hockey the kind of cachet it had not enjoyed in the U.S. since the Miracle on Ice.
"For sure, him coming here was the best thing that could happen to hockey," said former teammate and current Kings executive Luc Robitaille. "When you do well in Los Angeles, everybody knows and starts watching."
That was critical for the NHL, which then had only 14 of its 21 teams based in the U.S -- none south of Washington -- and especially for the Kings' flamboyant new owner, Bruce McNall, who had the only franchise west of St. Louis. The Kings had enjoyed little success since joining in the first expansion of 1967, but McNall -- who later lost the team and spent time in jail for fraud -- wanted to make an impact. To that end, he spent months trying to convince both Edmonton owner Peter Pocklington and then Gretzky to accept a trade. "I felt I had to do something dramatic to sell hockey in L.A., and there's no name in hockey like Wayne Gretzky," McNall wrote in his memoir, Fun While It Lasted. "We agreed that moving the greatest player in the history of the game to one of the two most visible media markets in the world would be very good for hockey,"
The deal quickly proved to be a boon for the Kings, who became a new "in thing." Celebrities like Tom Hanks, Goldie Hawn, Michael J. Fox and Tom Cruise appeared regularly at the Forum, local television ratings increased and attendance jumped nearly 30 percent in the first year after the trade. It got even better as the team improved in the coming seasons and made its way to the Stanley Cup Finals by 1993.
In the meantime, seeing the Kings succeed in a non-traditional market encouraged the NHL to try for the same results in places like San Jose, Anaheim, Tampa Bay and Miami. That early 1990s expansion set the stage for handing out even more franchises through the remainder of the decade, a period when the NHL began dotting the South and Southwest. The NHL ended up growing to 30 teams during that rush, 24 in the U.S., a strategy that was intended to get the league a much-coveted national network television contract.
It didn't. Instead, the quick growth spurt had an overwhelming inflationary effect on salaries as more teams chased fewer talents, while the quality of overall play and the interest level in the U.S. noticeably declined. Eventually, it led to work stoppages in 1994-95 and 2004-05.
The most recent labor dispute shut the NHL down for a full season and resulted in a salary cap that was supposed to give teams in the struggling non-traditional markets that Gretzky helped open a better chance to compete. But entering the fourth year of the collective bargaining agreement, many of those teams are still victimized by their own reckless spending and continue to struggle on the ice and at the box office. Some, like the Phoenix Coyotes -- where Gretzky is the head coach and a part owner -- might be worse off now than before the lockout.
Yet while the NHL's southern strategy leaves something to be desired, hockey has grown a great deal at the amateur level, in large part because of the league's broadened footprint. USA Hockey had fewer than 200,000 players registered nationwide in 1990 and today has some 460,000. And aside from more quantity, the U.S. is producing more quality, including 15 first-round picks in the past two drafts, one of them from California. In fact, 22 California-born players have played in the NHL since August 1988, and 47 have been drafted.
"The seeds were sown for a new generation of hockey players and we're starting to see that today with California kids, being drafted in NHL and the (junior) Western Hockey League," said Edmonton GM Kevin Lowe, a teammate of Gretzky's on the Oilers. "If NHL is ever going to be recognized as a top sport in the U.S., it has to come from the grass roots and kids playing in California, Texas, Florida in future years will be it.
"When they're in their 20s, 30s and 40s, they'll want to take their kids to the game because they had a passion for it when they were younger. Wayne Gretzky going to L.A. did that for hockey in the U.S."
