“When I came to Los Angeles in 1988, there were four high schools playing hockey. “Tampa Bay has won, Carolina has won, Dallas has won, the Ducks have won and the Kings have won,” said Gretzky.īut there’s no denying what’s happened at the grassroots level. Gretzky, of course, has also been blamed for so many sun-belt cities that are either dragging the league down with terrible attendance or are winning Stanley Cups, while Canadian teams have now gone 20 years since the last one, ironically when the Montreal Canadiens beat Wayne Gretzky and the Kings in the final. You are going to see a steady progression of California kids going to the NHL.”īurke said there wouldn’t have been the Anaheim Ducks if Gretzky hadn’t been sold to the Los Angeles Kings. “Youth hockey is beginning to be played at an extremely high level in southern California. And it’s not going to stop anytime soon.”īurke wasn’t talking about what was happening on the Stanley Cup ice. “I attribute this entirely to Wayne Gretzky,” he told your correspondent that day. It was back in 2007, days before the Anaheim Ducks became the first California team to win the Stanley Cup, when then-Ducks manager Brian Burke sat in his office and marvelled at what was happening.

And, while it’s not true in the southeast, those franchises are pretty solid there now.” “There’s a lot of kids coming out of California now. “In the long run, I suppose it was good for hockey,” he told your correspondent the other day. Twenty five years later, even Don Cherry admits it.

The game won - Gretzky had huge impact on growth of hockey in U.S. Check out the live chat Jones hosted Thursday afternoon. Below is the fifth of a six-part series that can be read in full in Friday’s Edmonton Sun – or online across Sun Media sites Aug. Twenty-five years later, legendary Edmonton Sun hockey scribe Terry Jones re-visits the day the NHL, and Canadian hockey, changed forever. 9, 1988, Wayne Douglas Gretzky was sold to the Los Angeles Kings for $18 million, a handful of players and the hearts and minds of a nation.

Manage Print Subscription / Tax ReceiptĬlick here for all our coverage of The Gretzky Trade, 25 years later.

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