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The Huddle
Hel lo, everyone, and welcome back to The Huddle, where today we’re talking about a trade that changed the course of an entire sport.
Hockey might not be the most popular sport, especially out here in rural Texas, but just about everyone knows the name Wayne Gretzky.
Known as “The Great One,” Gretzky is widely considered the greatest hockey player of all time. He won four Stanley Cups and remains the NHL’s alltime points leader with 2,857.
His scoring record is so ridiculous that even if you took away every goal he scored, Gretzky’s 1,963 assists alone would still make him the NHL’s alltime points leader.
He won all four of his Stanley Cups with the Edmonton Oilers in the 1980s and was on top of the hockey world.
It seemed like a sure thing Gretzky would finish his career in Edmonton.
Then came Aug. 9, 1988.
Wayne Gretzky was traded to the Los Angeles Kings.
I know what you’re thinking. Who in their right mind trades the greatest player ever and their franchise superstar after he helped win four championships?
Well, that’s a different conversation for a different day. Today, I want to talk about what that trade did for hockey.
And oddly enough, part of that story leads us to one of Disney’s best hockey movies ever made, The Mighty Ducks.
The movie captured the fun side of hockey and showed how a ragtag group of kids, led by their fearless coach Gordon Bombay, could come together and become champions. It became a favorite for a generation of young hockey fans and helped introduce the sport to kids who might otherwise never have watched it.
But The Mighty Ducks phenomenon — and eventually the NHL’s Anaheim Ducks — is difficult to imagine without Gretzky first arriving in Southern California.
Gretzky’s move to Los Angeles helped prove that hockey could succeed outside its tradit ional markets. As the sport’s popularity grew, the NHL expanded into new areas of the United States, with teams including the San Jose Sharks, Anaheim Ducks, Nashville Predators and Columbus Blue Jackets.
That growth has continued.
The Vegas Golden Knights and Seattle Kraken are among the NHL’s newest franchises, while the Utah Mammoth represents the league’s latest move into another nontraditional hockey market.
More than three decades later, interest in bringing NHL hockey to new markets continues, including speculation about a potential future franchise in Texas.
So, yes, even those of us sitting down here in Colorado County can see the ripple effects of what happened on Aug. 9, 1988.
One trade didn’t just send Wayne Gretzky from Edmonton to Los Angeles.
It helped change the map of hockey.
