If you look at Wayne Gretzky’s stats during his prime, it looks like somebody was playing a video game on the easy level. In the 1981-82 season, for example, he played in 80 games and scored 92 goals along with 120 assists.
I’m no hockey expert, but that’s insane.
50 goals in a season is considered elite. Gretzky did it 9 times.
Only 5 players in NHL history have had more than 100 assists in a season. Gretzky did it for 11 years in a row.
But, I understand that he’s not the most imposing physical specimen. So, what made him so dominant?
I was too young to remember his greatness in the early 80s. Was he just faster than everybody else? Did he have special mastery with the puck? Are there any examples that might demonstrate his brilliance?
You don’t need to be a gorilla to be successful in hockey. I’m no expert, but from what I remember he was quick and very accurate at goal shooting. While he wasn’t physically big, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t strong. Being strong, fast, and accurate are good traits to have in the NHL.
Gretsky had a combination of excellent skills, but I think what made him elite was his “game sense”. He had an amazing ability to predict where the puck and other players were going to be. He never seemed to hurry. It was almost Jedi-like, as if he could see several seconds into the future. He often just magically arrived in the right place and time to shoot or pass the puck, resulting in him or his teammates scoring a goal.
You see this with a handful of elite athletes. They say Joe DiMaggio was like that in the outfield. He never appeared to be rushing and would simply be under the ball when it got there. The great beach volleyball player Sinjin Smith was the same. An opponent would spike the ball at 95 mph and Sinjin would just be standing exactly where it was headed. No great reflexes required, he just had an amazing knack to read and predict where to be defensively.
Watch this play by Derek Jeter:
Look at all the moving parts and timing. That’s game sense.
I know very little about (ice) hockey, and I knew even less back then, but I remember watching him in the late 80s and thinking this guy is on a completely different level, but in terms of knowing where everyone else was and where they were going. Anticipation and precision.
Game vision is definitely the biggest one, but he was also a very very good skater. Not fast, necessarily, but extremely agile, able to turn on a dime and move in any direction at any time.
Also, and I’m not trying to minimize Gretzky’s achievements at all - he’s pretty much a lock for greatest hockey player, and probably the most dominant player in major north American sports -but whenever you’re looking at point and goal stats from the 80’s, it’s worth remembering that scoring was at an all-time high, with an average points per game 30-45% higher than we see today. Gretzky still lapped his contemporaries, but his era did help to increase his point totals.
He practiced on his backyard rink for like 8 hours a day as a kid with his dad. His dad taught him all the right things, most importantly to love the game so he felt like he was having fun instead of practicing and also the famous “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is” philosophy.
All that practice and learning and joy (plus his being naturally blessed by the hockey intuition gods) allowed him to play organized youth hockey against kids who were several years older than he was. That helped teach him to be a competitor and the importance of playing up to his opponents level.
He didn’t invent playing from behind the net, but he certainly perfected it and exploited his office like no one before or since. Forcing the defenders to look back to keep an eye on him freed up his teammates to skate and be in position to take a pass from him with more impunity. And if the D concentrated on the other skaters, he’d burn you with a wraparound.
In part. Others who know the NHL’s history better than me can probably provide more context, but part of it, as I understand it, was that the '80s were a period in between the NHL’s rapid expansion, and (in the '90s and later) better equipment and defensive strategies.
In 1967, the NHL had only six teams. By 1980, thanks to expansion, and absorbing four teams from the failed WHA in 1979, it was up to 21 teams. That diluted talent (and it was before there was the broadscale influx of players from Europe), and a few teams, like Gretzky’s Oilers, had concentrations of the best talent.
It seems like the 1980s scoring era was the culmination of all of that – there may have also been some rules changes which enhanced that, as well, but I’m not as familiar with that. What then changed, by the '90s, was that goalie equipment got bigger and better (and goalies got taller), goalkeeping techniques improved, and defensive strategies improved, including the adoption of the “neutral zone trap.”
John McPhee wrote about this re: Bill Bradley in his essay “A Sense of Where You Are.” (It also helped that Bradley’s range of peripheral vision was unusually wide, as confirmed by his eye doctor.)
With great passers (hockey and basketball mostly) people have said that if you weren’t in the right spot or not expecting the pass everyone in the arena knew that you were at fault, not the passer. The pass went to where you should have been and you should have been expecting it.
Partly that (I believe off-side rules were different), partly a lot of great offensive talent, partly rapid expansion watering down the talent pool. But mostly I think it was stagnation in defensive and goaltending strategies. The era basically ended with two inventions; the neutral zone trap, a crushingly effective defensive strategy that had to be neutered by rule changes in the mid 2000’s; and the butterfly, an extremely effective goaltending style popularized by Patrick Roy and Dominic Hasek that’s now used by basically every goalie in the world.
Note that the general offensive environment in question was due in no small part to Gretzky’s specific contributions, not only just from his individual and team point totals but his influence on the league as a whole.
He became infamous for banking shots off of the back of the goaltender.
Gretzky didn’t have to be the most imposing physical specimen on the ice because he had Dave Semenko and Marty McSorley hanging around ready to pulverize anybody who so much as looked at him funny.
