Gretzky trade brings hockey to the Sun Belt

Wayne Gretzky played with the Kings from 1988-96, leading them to the 1993 Stanley Cup finals. Manny Millan/SI

By Michael Farber, SI.com

In hindsight there were little hints, breadcrumbs along a fairytale trail that something major might be in the offing: The rumors Oilers general manager Glen Sather had told other GMs not long after Edmonton had won its fourth Stanley Cup in five years that Wayne Gretzky might be traded, for example. Like almost everyone else I stepped right over those breadcrumbs, at least the ones I didn't grind into the path with my heel.

It made no sense. Gretzky was 27, the best player in his sport, maybe the most accomplished player of any sport, and whispers that something might be afoot seemed delusional. In July Gretzky and Janet Jones had been married in Edmonton, Canada's royal wedding without any of the House of Windsor weirdness, and there was a warm amber glow surrounding a career -- no, a life -- that had been coated with pixie dust. Traded?

Then ... Canada was gobsmacked at first, then outraged. A Member of Parliament, Nelson Riis, urged the government to block the trade because Gretzky was "a national symbol, like the beaver," which might be construed as damming No. 99 with praise. Janet Gretzky, the B-list actress, was excoriated as the driving force behind the deal. (This was patently unfair, of course, but even then, the prevailing theory was women are to blame. See Simpson, Jessica.)

If nothing else, Gretzky's exile to Los Angeles produced one of hockey's immortal phrases, something trotted out every year at the trade deadline. Like death and taxes, it is a stone-cold lock that someone changing addresses on that day will say, "Even Wayne Gretzky got traded."

Before we brace ourselves for the seismic shocks that still roil the NHL almost two decades after venal Oilers owner Peter Pocklington made the mind-blowing deal -- all players who can go to the rink in shorts are Sons of Wayne Gretzky -- let's return to the 1967 expansion. This was the beginning of what passes for the NHL's Manifest Destiny, the end of the Original Six era. (There were, in fact, 10 teams in the NHL in 1927, but the indulgence surrounding the phrase "Original Six" is a lament for another day.) The league doubled in size in 1967, adding six American-based teams, including two in California, to remake a Mom-and-Pop outfit into something with grander designs, notably including a television deal in the United States.

But while the gambit appeared audacious, the 1967 expansion was quite systematic, carefully plotted by the NHL power brokers. In fact, hockey's plan aped major league baseball, which had plopped two franchises in California in 1958. The Gretzky trade -- His Greatness, Gretzky's metaphoric wingman Marty McSorley and Mike Krushelnyski for Jimmy Carson, Martin Gélinas, $15 million and three first-round draft picks -- went down on Aug. 9, 1988, and actually accomplished the same sort of thing, albeit organically.

Bobby Orr's arrival in Boston spawned a generation of hockey players in New England and the 1980 triumph in Lake Placid gave a country the warm-and-fuzzies while reinforcing hockey's strength in traditional areas, but Gretzky's arrival in Los Angeles reinvented the sport in the U.S.

At the time of the trade, there was no team south of Landover, Md., home of the Washington Capitals, and only one U.S.-based team west of St. Louis. (The California Golden Seals, as they were known in their last incarnation in Oakland, became the Cleveland Barons in 1976.) Now there are three teams in California, including 2006-07 Stanley Cup-champion Anaheim, a Southeast Division, and franchises in Nashville, Dallas and Phoenix. Of the Sun Belt teams, Tampa Bay, Carolina, Dallas and the Ducks have won Stanley Cups.

Without Gretzky's enormous crossover appeal -- raise your hands if you think another hockey player will be the host of Saturday Night Live within 20 years -- there is a distinct possibility several of these franchises would not exist. Gretzky's early years in Los Angeles, through the 1993 Cup final, were a perfect match of star power and a city that demands nothing less. A defenseman couldn't deflect a shot into the stands without the risk of braining someone who could "open" a movie, or at least had his own publicist. Kurt Russell, Goldie Hawn, John Candy ... the increasingly dilapidated Great Western Forum was the party hall for A-Listers, and, by extension, the entire NHL, the epicenter of the era of good feeling that lasted through the New York Rangers win in 1994.

The subsequent lockout and the spreading neutral-zone trap were buzzkillers; you can argue the Gretzky-fuelled overexpansion actually led directly to the Dead Puck era. Anyway, this was Wayne's world. We were just living in it.

May 11, 1976: Larry Robinson's check on Gary Dornhoefer, Game 2, 1976 Stanley Cup final

The most significant check in the history of the NHL, at least symbolically, left quite an impression -- an indentation in the boards that a forlorn maintenance worker at the Montreal Forum had to repair with a hammer. In the third period of Game 2 of the 1976 final -- the Canadiens had won the opener -- the Philadelphia Flyers' Dornhoefer, a robust 6-foot-1, 190-pound forward, was trying to slither past the 6-foot-4, 225-pound Robinson down the right-wing boards. Robinson stepped in with a hip check -- like letter writing, another lost art -- and sent Dornhoefer into the boards with such force that the Flyer spit blood for a few days. "I had Larry worried on that play," Dornhoefer said in a recent telephone conversation. "He thought he killed me." Those at the game say the rigid Forum boards were displaced two inches. Although probably no more devastating than one of Scott Stevens' playoff hits -- Slava Kozlov, Eric Lindros, Ron Francis, Paul Kariya ... take your pick -- Robinson's had greater totemic importance.

The Barbarians were at the NHL's gates in 1976, the Broad Street Bullies, two-time Cup champions, and some team needed to yank the game back from the precipice of the cartoonish violence into which it seemed poised to leap. Montreal understood the Flyers had to be mastered on their own terms. A preseason brawl set the tone, but Robinson's was the period at the end of the sentence. The Canadiens, who had flair and toughness, won Game 2, swept the Flyers and then spun that Cup into three more, a grand dynastic run. The NHL regained its equilibrium, ushering in an era where intimidation -- always a part of the game -- did not subsume the other elements.

Sept. 2, 1972: Game 1 of the Summit Series between Canada and Russia at the Montreal Forum

If you ask most people about the significant moment of the Summit Series, that eight-game marvel between the Soviet Union and Canada, the quick (and incorrect) answer is Paul Henderson's series-winning goal with 34 seconds left in Moscow in Game 8. While Henderson's late heroics in the series are noteworthy -- in fact, he scored the winner in Games 6, 7 and 8 for Canada -- the game with the greatest impact was the opener, a 7-3 Soviet win in Montreal. Wallowing in the ooze of their own misplaced self-confidence, the Canadian players, matching the hubris of their TV-watching countrymen, thought the Soviets would be pushovers.

When Phil Esposito scored 30 seconds into the game and Canada led by two after six minutes, the natural order of the hockey universe seemed intact. When the Soviets roared back, it was like an iced shot of vodka down the gullet. The smug world of Canadian hockey was shaken, a faith that not even Henderson could fully restore 26 days later in an event watched by a larger audience in his country than Neil Armstrong's moonwalk three years before.

The Canada Cups, the World Cups, even NHL players in the Olympics are offspring of the Summit Series, which, right from that stunning victory in Montreal, whetted the appetite for international best-on-best play. But on a subtler level, the skill and the style of the Soviets opened up the conventional-thinking NHL to the possibility of the European player. Swedes started trickling over in the 1970s, soon joined by the Finns. During (and after) the tectonic shifts in the political landscape of the 1980s, defecting Czechoslovakians and, yes, Russians followed. Certainly the NHL would have been flung open at some point in any case, but the Summit Series, starting with Game 1, established the process.

The curved blade is introduced, circa 1963

There is a healthy debate about who invented the curve, Stan Mikita or Andy Bathgate. (Victory has 1,000 fathers, but defeat is an orphan, no?) The story I have heard most often is that Mikita, upset during practice, (this was back in his angry, pre-Lady Byng Trophy days in Chicago) tried to break a stick by jamming it between the boards and the hinges of the door to the players' bench. Instead of breaking, the blade bent. When Mikita tried the misshapen blade in practice, he found he could make the puck rise and wobble.

If you prefer another version, consider Bathgate's. The estimable New York Rangers forward would run hot water over the blade and leave it crammed in the door of the toilet stalls in the dressing room overnight; this would produce a curve by morning. I have no idea which gentleman, if either, created the original curved stick, but the Mikita story is sexier. Besides, he scored 541 goals and was referenced in Wayne's World. Game, set, and match Mr. Mikita and his doughnuts.

The important thing, of course, is not the inventor but the inventory of curved blades that soon followed, which forced the NHL to place limits on curves. (The league fiddled with the standards for blades four times in the decade after Mikita/Bathgate's creation. And you think it has screwed around with the in-the-crease rules the past 10 years.) Anyway, the flat blade soon was passé, which made the backhand as much as a curio as the rotary-dial phone would be 30 years later. With Mikita and Blackhawks teammate Bobby Hull whipping slapshots at goalies -- alas, Boom Boom Geoffrion didn't invent the slapper -- the goalie mask -- yes, Clint Benedict beat Jacques Plante to the mask by generations -- goaltenders decided to cover their kissers in increasing numbers. The curved blade, in fact, became the driving force behind virtually every safety improvement in the game, which, despite the seeming indifference of the Players Association to workplace safety throughout the years, is a good thing.

Oct. 20, 1966: Bobby Orr makes his NHL debut

Orr might not have been the best player ever -- this is a mug's debate, something for another forum -- but he is the most indelible. The first time I saw Orr was during his rookie season in Boston, 1966-67, a Saturday afternoon game against the Rangers. I remember three things about that day: paying a scalper a 100 percent mark-up on a ticket (five bucks for a $2.50 end-arena, nosebleed seat at the Boston Garden), a Johnny Bucyk penalty shot and watching Orr skate figure eights around the Rangers.

I had never seen anything like him. Still haven't. From back to front, Orr reinvented the game like few others. The brilliant Doug Harvey might have been the original rushing defenseman -- Harvey's Montreal teammate and Orr's coach in Boston, the late Tom Johnson, told me a few months before he died that he couldn't choose between these two blueliners -- but Orr built on that base and pushed it in daring new directions. He helped changed the role of defensemen from stay-at-home to joining-the-rush to sometimes leading-the-rush. His league-leading total of 120 points (33 goals, 87 assists) in 1969-70 is as remarkable in its way as Gretzky's record 215 points. Of course, Orr was not about numbers but intriguing possibilities, how beautifully hockey could be played. For that, the puckheads of the world owe him their heartfelt thanks.