So…with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, what are we to make of the Great Gretzky Selloff of ‘88?
More often-than-not, sports commentators will drag out of the old company line that the trade of Wayne Gretzky to the Los Angeles Kings helped grow the game of hockey in non-traditional markets.
Did it? And if it did, to what extent? And what has been the permanence of that impact? And what have been the drawbacks of that impact, if any?
The actual trading of Gretzky, by suddenly cash-poor Peter Pocklington of the Edmonton Oilers, was an event that knocked all other news stories off the Canadian front pages and newscasts that August 9th evening. Though the trade had been in the works for possibly months, most of Joe Q. Public only got a whiff of it a couple of days beforehand.
Mick Q. Public vividly recalls laughing it up at one of the fine pubs on Elgin Street in downtown Ottawa, drunk with the knowledge that no hockey man in his right mind would make such a trade. The Oilers were a bona fide dynasty already; four Stanley Cups in five years…and they should have been able to win the 1986 Cup. The future still looked very, very bright for this young, talented team from Northern Alberta.
But as most of us know, sometimes rather painfully, professional sports is first-and-foremost a business, and businesses like to make money, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Granted, often businesses make a deal or two with Satan enroute to Enron status, or shamefully exploit the undervalued/undereducated worker in third-world countries, but hey, what’s a few twisted morals in exchange for cheap sneakers!?!
Enter one Peter Puck, would-be Canadian Prime Minister, hostage survivor, and all-around Gainers meat kind of guy, one not afraid to use strike-breakers during a labour strike. In other words, a man not afraid to put himself first.
Damn a once-in-a-lifetime professional hockey team, damn an immortal legacy of near-perfection, damn it all! What can I get for my depreciating asset aka Wayne Douglas Gretzky?
When the trade of Gretzky was confirmed that evening, for many of us, it was the end of the National Hockey League as a sort of national trust. Sure, most of the teams were stationed in the United States, but we’re Canadian, remember. Most of our cities are nestled a shoeshoe’s throw away from the 49th parallel. Our cultural and financial dialogue is more North-South than East-West. Heck, we like the Americans. After all, history and geography have made us practically brothers.
At its core, the NHL was as Canadian as maple syrup, the Guess Who, Maggie Trudeau at Studio 54, and those Hinterland Who’s Who mini-documentaries that always came on to fill up screen time right after the Saturday morning cartoons were over. We could deal with the fact the league was largely run from the U.S.; we had become somewhat comfortable living with a branch-plant mentality. To prove the point, we elected an English-speaking Prime Minister from Quebec who followed the same approach in politics.
But this, well, this was a bit too much. Not enough to justify New Democratic Party MP Nelson Riis standing up in the House of Commons and demanding that the Conservative Government of Brian Mulroney block the trade (first-of-all, Mulroney was a free trader, so most likely he would have been more interested in seeing what he could have fetched for Mats Naslund), but we all got the good-humoured point…is there nothing Canadian left that is not for sale to the Yanks?
Immediate dividends were paid to both parties in the trade; the Kings suddenly gained national U.S. exposure and the Oilers added young talent to a still-formidable lineup.
The Wayner was suddenly everywhere; which goes to show that his wooden appearance on “The Young and The Restless” seven years earlier had largely been forgotten by Tinsel Town. Wayne and Magic posed for the cover of Sports Illustrated, Wayne began to show up on the chat shows, Wayne and his lovely new bride were a semi-regular feature on that bellweather hard-hitting TV journalism show Entertainment Tonight, Wayne hosted Saturday Night Live, Wayne was on billboards everywhere, Wayne, Wayne, Wayne, Wayne.
Actually, come to think of it, most of the U.S. were only then getting a taste of what we in the Frozen North had already endured for years; Wayne as National Spokesperson for every product known to mankind.
But hey, it worked. Gretzky sold. He had pizzazz. Wayne Gretzky transcended the parochial world of pro hockey more than any player before or since. The Rocket Richards, Gordie Howes, and Bobby Orrs of the world made their dent, but Gretzky was known to people who didn’t care a lick about ice hockey.
He was a Superstar. The only true one the National Hockey League has ever known.
And what better place for a Superstar than the brightest stage-on-Earth. Los Angeles, California.
The L.A. Kings had finished the 1987-88 season festooned in their purple-and-gold motif, led by the likes of Luc Robitaille (111 points) and Jimmy Carson (107 points). The Kings gained 68 points in 80 games, and lost in the first round of the playoffs to the Calgary Flames, who were expected to make it to the Stanley Cup Final, after posting a league-leading 105 points.
They didn’t get there, thanks to a four-game sweep at the hands of their bitter rivals, the Edmonton Oilers, who were having an “off-year” by Oiler standards, finishing with only 99 points. The defining moment of that series was the Game Two overtime goal, on Calgary ice, by Wayne Gretzky…a howitzer of a slapshot over the shoulder of Mike Vernon. The Flames never recovered. They would have to wait one more year before hoisting their first Stanley Cup.
As for the Oilers, they rode that upset all the way to the Final, where they took on a Boston Bruins team still dealing with the shock of having finally beated the Montreal Canadiens in the playoffs. The Ray Bourque/Cam Neely/Reggie Lemelin Bruins were so shocked, they actually let the upstart New Jersey Devils extend them to seven games in the Eastern Conference Final.
Not that any of that would matter; the Oilers dispatched of the Bruins in four games…wait…five games, as there was that infamous “power failure in Boston game” of May 24th that was declared a 3-3 tie, and the Oilers returned home (again) to Edmonton for the coronation.
That was the Cup win where Captain Gretzky gestured for his teammates and coaches to join him at centre ice for a joyful, informal team portrait with Lord Stanley, another Gretzky contribution to the rich fabric of hockey. Did Wayne know something was up? Did he want a momento to remember a passing of an era? Come to think of it, the Gretzky-owned Hull Olympics of the Quebec Junior League were sporting black-and-silver uniforms that season, the very same colour scheme the L.A. Kings would adopt when Gretzky joined them.
After the trade, the Kings finished second in the Smythe Division with 91 points (the eventual Cup champions, the Flames, led the league with 117 points), while the Oilers were third with 84. As fate would have it, the two teams met up in the first round of the playoffs.
Talk about an argument for not trading within your own division. The series went seven, with the hometown Kings taking the deciding game 6-3. While the Oilers went off and licked their wounds, the Kings’ magic carpet ride was short-lived, as the Flames swept them in four straight…which must have felt damn good for a number of Calgary veterans, who were usually on the losing end of battles against Gretzky.
From this point on, things get more interesting in the post-Gretzky trade NHL. The 1989-90 Oilers teams, captained by Mark Messier, and with sizeable contributions from the young players obtained in the big trade, won the Cup that season, the fifth in seven years for Edmonton. The Kings, led by coach Tom Webster, couldn’t get past the second round. They didn’t need Wayne Gretzky for that. The Kings had been bumping their heads on the second round glass ceiling for years.
The Oilers couldn’t defend their 1990 Cup, falling in five in the third round to the powerhouse Minnesota North Stars, who had all of 68 points in the regular-season, but not before first disposing of Gretzky and his Kings in the second round.
It took the installing of Barry Melrose as head coach, and some Tony Robbins tapes, for the Kings for finally get past their playoff barrier, and all the way to the 1993 Stanley Cup Final, where, thanks in part to the first boneheaded move in the career of Marty McSorley, they lost in five games to Patrick Roy/Kirk Muller/John LeClair and the Montreal Canadiens.
In some ways, the 1993 playoffs was Gretzky’s greatest post-season performance, including a memorable and (in Toronto) a somewhat controversial third-round seven-game series with the resurgent Toronto Maple Leafs. Game Seven was held in Gretzky’s boyhood backyard, Maple Leaf Gardens, and the Great One responded, putting the Kings on his back and leading them where Marcel Dionne, Charlie Simmer, Juha Widing, Eddie Joyal, Bob Berry, Gary Sargent, Daryl Evans and Rogie Vachon could not take them…to the Stanley Cup Final.
As they say, hockey went from the back pages to the front pages in L.A. All the Hollywood stars that flocked to the Fabulous Forum when Gretzky appeared in 1988 were suddenly joined by their actor friends, and they told two friends, and they told two friends. The NHL rode the Gretzky wave to new heights unimagined in the U.S. (though, it should soberly be pointed out, still well below the interest levels of the NBA, Major League Baseball and the mighty NFL), and the league surfed that wave further with the 1994 Cup win by the Mark Messier-led New York Rangers.
Only to see any and all momentum halted by a labour dispute that would claim almost half of the 94-95 season, thus spoiling all the hard work of the past two years, the league shooting itself in the foot, as only the NHL is wont to do.
But before that dark day, the league saw arguably the first fruits of the planting of Gretzky in the southwest. Thanks to a dispute within the ownership ranks of the Minnesota North Stars, the San Jose Sharks were born in time for the 1991-92 campaign. In a sense, the California Golden Seals were going home, but that’s another story.
While not truly an expansion team, for the newborn Sharks and the North Stars split assets, the team in San Jose was the first new franchise since the league absorbed the four remaining World Hockey Association franchises following the 1978-79 seasons. The Sharks were the first “original” new NHL team since the Golden Seals relocated to Cleveland for two dreadful years. To be more exact, the San Jose Sharks were the first almost completely brand-new NHL franchise since the Washington Capitals and Kansas City Scouts entered the league in 1974. (To be annoyingly precise, the Ottawa Senators and Tampa Bay Lightning were the first completely brand-new NHL franchises to enter the league since that 1974 expansion).
The addition of the Sharks helped pull the NHL into the new era of pro sports that all the other leagues were handsomely capitalizing on.
Marketing.
The teal-clad merchandise of the San Jose Sharks was an immediate success in the stores. Like a scene out of Pleasantville, the teal uniforms of the Sharks took the NHL from it’s black-and-white days, in terms of marketing, into glorious technicolour.
Other teams took notice, and before too long, there was a rush to redesign uniforms, and logos, and eventually, the rise of the third jersey, decades after Major League Baseball had already introduced the money-making possibilities of the Sunday jersey, and the Tuesday jersey, and the Friday night jersey, and the throwback jersey, and the Fourth of July jersey, and so on, and so on.
On the ice, the Sharks were a success, making the playoffs in only their third season, and doing well at the box office. The 1992 expansion to Ottawa and Tampa was fraught with potential peril. The NHL shocked many with placing a team in Canada, particularly when it became apparent the applicants based their proposal on a land-grab and a house-of-cards, while the absentee ownership in Florida wasn’t much better.
But wait, things got goofier very quickly. Just when it appeared as though the league would settle down to a a manageable 24 team league, one snowy day in 1992, the NHL dropped a bombshell by announcing that Miami and Anaheim would be getting teams.
Suddenly, expansion fever was in the air. Want a team? Got a team! We’ll worry about the finances later. In some case, much, much later.
The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim were the most curious of the early 90’s expansion teams. Named after a series of second-rate family movies about a spunky bunch of kids playing hockey, the Mighty Ducks were owned by the Evil Empire, the Disney Corporation, who could never be accused of passing up a marketing opportunity, no matter how lame-brained.
This was during the reign of Michael Eisner, who, if memory is correct, went so far as to petition the league to have his NHL team sport those same gawd-awful forest green uniforms the kids’ team in the movies wore.
Thankfully, the NHL marketing gurus thought otherwise, and developed a rather clever, yet too cute, duck/goalie mask hybrid logo.
Which sold. Like the proverbial hotcakes. And who doesn’t like hotcakes?
The Ducks played in Orange County, where residents make it very clear to the rest of the world that they ain’t from L.A. There was a ton of money to be made in that market, even if the level of interest didn’t translate to anyone outside of the arena (and this dynamic didn’t change even with the Ducks Stanley Cup win in 2007).
And it wasn’t as if the level of hockey would become watered down by all this rampant expansion; the talent pool for top-notch hockey players was entering a golden age (which we’re still in). Players could be harvested from Canada, the United States, Sweden, Finland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany, and now Russia and all her former satellite countries, thanks to the breakup of the Sovier Union.
Keeping this in mind, and never saying no to easy money, the NHL continued to bloat. Before long, there were franchises in unlikely places such as Columbus and Nashville, and teams restored in Atlanta and Minnesota. The North Stars had relocated to the great state of Texas, while three of the four WHA franchises, probably doomed from the start, moved to Phoenix, Denver, and Raleigh.
Suddenly, there were 30 teams. In strong markets and weak markets. In traditional markets, and non-traditional markets. In television markets, and in walk-up markets. You throw a stone, you’d hit an NHL franchise, though there remained doubts as to if you’d hit any actual ticket buyers in some cities.
Throw into the equation the weak Canadian dollar of the mid 90’s (when compared to the American greenback), plus the pipedream of a national U.S. television contract, and suddenly the power in the NHL had almost completely headed south, a paradigm shift maybe most acutely symbolized by the 1996 World Cup of Hockey win by the United States.
Canadian teams were having problems attracting or retaining key free agents, while some clubs such as the Oilers, Flames, Senators, and even the Montreal Canadiens, were experiencing financial problems, and the vultures were beginning to circle.
The league stepped in as best it could with the Canadian Assistant Program, and Canadian television money continued to flow into the NHL coffers in ways that would and will never be matched by U.S. TV. Regardless, Go South Young Man was the new mantra of the National Hockey League.
And now we get to today. Post lockout. October 2005 to right now.
The Canadian dollar has rebounded considerably in relationship to the U.S. dollar, thanks in large part to unstable U.S. markets affected by the bottom falling out of the mortgage industy, and petroleum speculators, and other financial factors too complicated for most of us to wrap our heads around. All we have to know is that the two countries’ dollars are practically on par.
Which makes doing business in Canada suddenly palatable again. Where that leads the NHL is anyone’s guess, but even new NHL Player Association head Paul Kelly has mused about the stability of the hockey market in Canada, and if the league were to expand to 32 teams, one would surely have to be placed north of the border.
Romantics go on-and-on about the repatriation of the Winnipeg Jets, but most likely that won’t happen, even though, for example, the Phoenix Coyotes continue to struggle at the gate, regardless of the official party line from the team or the league, and they’re only one of maybe eight teams in some financial difficulty…even with Wayne Gretzky as the head coach.
And what about that Gretzky fella? Can all this be laid at his feet?
In a word, yes. Not that Gretzky nor anyone else could have predicted the ramifications from the first domino falling.
In a few more sober words, that’s waaaaay too simplistic a reading of the fallout from the 1998 Gretzky trade to Los Angeles, but the threads are there.
A few bullet points:
- Biggest Star in League History is traded to Los Angeles
- L.A. media, thus much of the U.S. national media, suddenly awake to the fact they’ve had an NHL team for the past 21 years
- Gretzky is catapulted in to the same stratosphere as the likes of Michael Jordan and Larry Bird
- NHL benefits from the marketing of Gretzky
- hockey is suddenly “hot”
- speculators want to get in on the action, some with money (Disney), some without (McNall, Boots, etc…)
- NHL takes the easy expansion money, and suddenly grows from 21 teams to 30 teams in less than a decade
- former NBA executive Gary Bettman is hired as NHL Commissioner to oversee the new NHL, chiefly to land that ever-elusive big U.S. TV contract
- that contract never comes-to-pass, and the NHL is no longer the fourth sport in the U.S., as a split in the open-wheel racing community in the U.S. and Canada allows NASCAR to move up in popularity at an astonishing rate, becoming a marketing and television behemoth
- with no big U.S. television contract, and shrinking audience numbers on the likes of Fox and ESPN, the NHL finds itself on the newly renamed Versus network, immediately frustrating a large number of American hockey fans
- NHL and its players squander an entire season (R.I.P. 2004-2005) thanks to a labour dispute, which it’s still to fully recover from, though it is pointed in the right direction, thanks to the likes of Alexander Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby
- with no big U.S. TV contract, anywhere from six to eight U.S. based teams are in some financial difficulty, so much so that reportedly up to eight of them have contacted Blackberry guru Jim Balsillie to gauge his interest in taking over part or all of the team, even though the NHL appeared to do everything in its power to dissuade the Kitchener, Ontario-based billionaire from owning a franchise
Conclusion…thanks for nothing, Wayne.
Is that the true legacy of the Gretzky trade to the Kings. Crappy U.S.-based teams in markets that can’t sustain them?
It’s not like there’s not NHL fans in the United States; if anything, there’s more hockey fans in the U.S than in Canada, just going by sheer population numbers alone, so it’s only logical a league would base the vast majority of its franchises in the States.
But not in cities/areas where, after a decade, it’s still to take root. Instead of Phoenix or Atlanta or Nashville, why not, say, Milwaukee. They were once offered a crack at a team, but balked at the high expansion fee.
Go figure. A potential owner who said I ain’t got that much money, instead of the charlatans who have pulled the wool over the eyes of the league and received their expansion team regardless.
The 1980 U.S. Olympic Team’s gold medal did more for hockey in the U.S than the Gretzky trade to L.A. Both events are getting smaller and smaller in the rear-view mirror, and no doubt the grace of Mike Modano, or the grit of Jeremy Roenick or the Cups wins by the Detroit Red Wings have been a greater motivator for interest in hockey in the States.
If anything, the Gretzky trade to L.A. did more damage to the NHL than it did sustainable good.
But you won’t hear that from most quarters. You’ll hear the same old line trotted out. The trade of Gretzky to the Kings helped grow the game of hockey in the States.
- Mick Kern
(p.s. even the 99 of Gretzky is no longer sancrosanct in Los Angeles, as Manny Ramirez wears the number for the Los Angeles Dodgers. There outta be a law)