Wayne Gretzky's Hidden Legacy

As Wayne Gretzky’s career becomes a memory, I find myself worried that people have begun to misconstrue the way he played.

For instance, almost every Gretzky video on YouTube is a compilation of goals scored in the early 1980s on goalies who look pathetic. Many of these clips do not do Gretzky justice.

There’s much more to Wayne Gretzky than the hurting he put on goalies of the early 1980s, who were completely unsuited to face a player so far ahead of his time

For most of the 20th century, goalie pads were made of deer hair covered with fabric. This was an unfortunate trend, because deer hair absorbs water easily and becomes heavier when waterlogged. It was impossible for a goalie using the old-style pads to quickly drop into the butterfly and jump back to his feet.

Some goalies managed to excel with these pads despite their limitations—Ken Dryden, Billy Smith, Vladislav Tretiak, Tony Esposito, and Pelle Lindbergh were some of the best. Either they were unusually nimble to the point where the pads couldn’t hold them down (Tretiak, Smith and Lindbergh), or incorporated their size into their style especially well (Esposito and Dryden).

The old-style pads were still the trend in 1980, as were many other archaic hockey traditions. Many goalies still wore old-fashioned flimsy masks, and the stick handling and speed of the game was incomparable to today—except for the Montreal Canadiens, who made a mockery of the rest of the league during the late seventies) The NHL game still lacked the pace which it had seen in a flash when the Red Army played Canada in 1972.

Enter Gretzky in 1980. By 1983, the old-style masks were gone. By 1990, no goalie in the league used the old-style pads, and the game was infinitely faster.

It’d be crazy to attribute this all to one player—but there is no denying that Wayne Gretzky was ready to play the modern game of hockey years before the rest of the league, and was by far the most powerful agent of change in the game.

This is the contrast we see in the clips from the early '80s, when Gretzky blazes past the apparently untalented goalies. However, by 1990, the power of Gretzky’s slapshot was average compared to the rest of the league—in the old clips, his shot looks like it’s 150 MPH.

The point I wish to make is that Gretzky’s scoring dominance somewhat hides the fact that he was far ahead of his time in all facets of the game. The NHL eventually caught up to Gretzky’s goal-scoring abilities, and by 1990, he was just one of the best snipers. However, he was still far ahead (and still is) of everybody in terms of his resourcefulness on the ice.

Gretzky was always far and away the smartest player in the NHL, and his ability to come up with logistical answers to various attempts to stop him should be better remembered than it is.

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