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By Tom Kludt
Wayne Gretzky is hockey. The most productive who has ever played this sport, as synonymous with sport as Babe Ruth is baseball. But lately, Gretzky has been asked questions about soccer, most notably about Lionel Messi, whose successful signing with Major League Soccer’s Inter Miami evoked the boy’s memories of the star-studded arrival in Ontario more than 30 years ago. “Yes, other people have asked me about it,” Gretzky said with a laugh during our recent conversation.
You can’t blame other people (e. g. me) for making the comparison. Gretzky’s industry, from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings before the 1988-89 season, remains the biggest seismic upgrade in NHL history, with repercussions still being felt decades later. Messi, Gretzky came to the U. S. USA with the resume of a GOAT, having won 4 Stanley Cups and 8 consecutive Hart Trophies (the equivalent of the league’s most valuable player) for Edmonton. And like Messi, Gretzky carried the hopes of a league desperate to make its mark on the American sports landscape.
But Gretzky, who is now the studio’s senior analyst for TNT’s NHL coverage, which kicks off a new season this week, points to some key differences. “I would say the biggest difference is that a giant ethnic population in the South Beach domain in Miami,” Gretzky said. “There are a lot of other people who have moved to the country and are football fans, and it’s evident that the signing of Messi has highlighted all those other people because they love this game. “
When he landed in Los Angeles, Gretzky said, “People didn’t know, didn’t perceive and didn’t see hockey. “
“We started with the floor,” he said. We had to teach the children to play. We had to show the game to other people. We spent endless hours doing hockey clinics.
Gretzky’s arrival in the United States has generated a stir reminiscent of Messi’s madness this summer. He hosted Saturday Night Live at the end of his first season with the Kings, who suddenly became a staple in Los Angeles. The team’s home attendance soared nearly 30 percent in Gretzky’s first year there, when celebrities began combining his on-court appearances at Lakers games with his appearances at Kings games. Gretzky also had a profound impact locally in the United States. Participation in youth hockey skyrocketed. after the trade, the Gretzky effect was felt to the fullest in California. When he arrived in Los Angeles, Gretzky says there were 4 top-notch school teams; Within a few years, this number had risen to more than a hundred.
Gretzky was a similar catalyst for the league’s expansion in the U. S. Sun Belt. U. S. Los Angeles was the NHL’s only “warm weather” market at the time of the trade, however, expansion groups emerged in Anaheim, San Jose, and Florida in the following years. The league has grown from 21 groups in 1988 to 32 today, with several scattered throughout the southern United States.
“We’re still seeing the residual effect of what he did when he went to Los Angeles,” said Paul Bissonnette, a former Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes player who is now a studio analyst at TNT along with Gretzky. “I don’t think there’s expansion to what extent it exists without Wayne coming to the U. S. U. S. You have to take a look at the landscape and expansion of the NHL and say it can have a ratio of 25 to 50 percent consistent with the current state of the game. “
It’s been 24 years since Gretzky last played in the NHL, but as the puck drops for another season this week, reminders of its effect are evident across the league. The EE. UU. es skills group more powerful than ever, with six U. S. players decided in the NHL Entry Draft in June and one player from the USA Hockey Development Program selected in the top five for the fifth consecutive year. The Tampa Bay Lightning, born during the Sun Belt’s expansion in the early 1990s, have been among the most successful teams in the league for the past 20 years. The defending Stanley Cup champions live in Las Vegas, where Gretzky and the Kings played the NHL’s first official outdoor game, a preseason exhibition in the Caesars parking lot. Palace faced the New York Rangers in 1991. Meanwhile, Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin enters the season chasing Gretzky’s career goal record.
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Even off the ice, Gretzky continues to serve as an evangelist by spreading the gospel of hockey. “We all have to be ambassadors to grow the game, whether it’s us at TNT, the guys at ESPN or the players themselves,” Gretzky said. “We all have a duty because we all need the game to grow and improve. “
Kind and kind, Gretzky probably doesn’t seem like the ultimate herbal consumer in the turbulent world of study reviews. He himself wasn’t so sure when approached through Turner Sports, the owner of TNT, now known as Warner Bros. Discovery Sports, which, along with ESPN, secured the NHL’s broadcast rights in 2021. Gretzky said he was eventually persuaded through his wife, actress Janet Jones, and fellow TNT commentator Charles Barkley.
“He talked about the greatness of the TNT organization and how much they need to make basketball bigger and better, and they’re going to do the same with hockey,” Gretzky said of Barkley. “So yes, it’s a pretty simple resolution after speaking. “to him. “
He spends his winters in Florida, making it easy for him to get to TNT’s Atlanta studios to watch NHL broadcasts of netpaintings every Wednesday. “It’s not authoritarian,” Gretzky said. We went upstairs, painted on Wednesday and passed by the house on Thursday. I can’t say enough good things about this. I love him. I love talking about hockey.
“It’s an encyclopedia of hockey,” Bissonnette said. Not only was he the most productive I’ve ever played, I think he’s the most absorbing of everything that’s going on around the game. “
Last month, Warner Bros. Discovery Sports announced it had hired Gretzky, Bissonnette and their two NHL studio analysts, retired NHL player Anson Carter and legendary former goalie Henrik Lundqvist, with multi-year extensions.
WBDS now offers a live sports portfolio that includes the NHL, MLB and NBA, as well as a list of farmers’ lounges for each corresponding study program. Gretzky and his co-hosts were well received by enthusiasts and critics alike, as were Boston Red Sox icon Pedro Martinez and MLB anchors on TBS, also produced through WBDS. But any of the exhibits (and perhaps all of the studio shows) will invite comparisons to Inside the NBA, TNT’s beloved establishment hosted through Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal. Gretzky accepts the parallels and calls TNT’s NHL anchor Liam McHugh “the closest thing to Ernie Johnson you can get in sports. “Bissonnette is “our Charles,” Gretzky told me.
As a commentator, Gretzky is by no means a Barkley, whose studio career has been plagued by harsh complaints against fashionable musicians. Yes, we have to be critical, but overall we have to be positive about the game and the players, because the game is bigger than any individual,” Gretzky said. “It’s a wonderful game and the more positive we are, the more players will see the display and want to be a part of it. We don’t want to be negative. We don’t want to communicate about players’ mistakes or what they did wrong.
The comments can’t just be Kumbaya’s, of course, but Gretzky said it lets Bissonnette “be a little bit of the guys. “
The two men starred in TNT’s study program, showcasing an herbal chemistry and a replica fueled by their contrasts: Gretzky, 62, the statesman-led legend; Bissonnette, 38, the self-proclaimed “fourth-line male,” who is fashionable and a little loud. “I don’t have the credibility as a player that most guys on the panel have,” Bissonnette said.
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In the media realm, however, Bissonnette’s star shines as brightly as any other. Spittin’ Chiclets, the Barstool Sports podcast that Bissonnette hosts along with Ryan Whitney and Brian McGonagle, is one of the most popular in the sports genre with an avid audience. in the United States and Canada. ” I don’t know if a bigger celebrity in hockey for kids between 16 and 30,” Gretzky said of Bissonnette.
Gretzky is positive about the long-term NHL, which has a large pool of veteran and emerging talent. Ovechkin and Penguins star Sidney Crosby, the two iconic players of the twenty-first century, are giving way to a glut of young phenomena like the one in Edmonton. Connor McDavid, Jack Hughes of the New Jersey Devils and Cale Makar of the Colorado Avalanche.
For Gretzky, it’s reminiscent of the days of Mario Lemieux, Steve Yzerman, Brett Hull and Mark Messier, contemporaries who he says created a “perfect storm” for the NHL when he arrived in Los Angeles. “I rode the wave with them and we all pushed and promoted the game as productive as we could,” he said. “They were wonderful players and had charisma. They understood what it meant to sell the game. “
He feels the same vibe from the league’s current players, who he says are “as good or better” than those who came before him. “I don’t think hockey has ever been in a more powerful position than it is now,” he said. saying.
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