Michael Griffiths
Rock n' Roll Doggie
Consider this:
* No one has ever had a 200 point season except for Gretzky, and Gretzky had 4 of them.
* 5 times in Gretzky's career, he won the scoring title on his assists alone.
* He scored by far the most goals in NHL history (894), but if you took them ALL away, he'd still be the all time leading points scorer based on his assists alone.
* He has well over a 1000 more points than the 2nd leading scorer of all time.
* In the 80s, he usually won the scoring title by about 80 points, even when Lemieux was playing.
* People said that he scored a lot ONLY because he had a great team to play with. If that is true, why did he have about a 100 points more than the 2nd leading scorer on the Oilers, year after year?
* When Gretzky was taken off the Stanley Cup champions (the Oilers) and placed on the 4th worst team in the league from the year before (the LA Kings), he beat his old team (the Oilers) in the playoffs that very year! That should be proof enough of his greatness, right there.
* Gretzky won 3 scoring titles while playing wih the LA Kings (so there goes that whole "he needed great players to play with" argument).
* When Gretzky and Lemieux were both in their primes, they played together in the Canada Cup. Who led the team in scoring? Gretzky.
* Had Gretzky played 82 games in 1983-84, he would have scored 221 points.
* From 81-82 until 86-87 (six seasons), he AVERAGED over 200 points per year - six seasons!
* In the 84-85 playoffs, Gretzky scored 47 points in only 18 games. Unreal.
* He had 50 hat tricks. The last one came when he was 37, against the Vancouver Canucks. He had 5 points. The 3rd goal was like something out of a cartoon. He slowed the game down, and then watched players fall and stumble all around him, including Kirk McLean, and skated behind the net in slow motion and popped it into the open side on the back hand like there was nothing to it. Even the Vancouver fans gave him a standing ovatation after that one.
* True, he did score 92 goals in a season, but do you know who scored the second most? Gretzky: 87 goals.
* Gretzky scored 50 goals in less than 50 games 3 times - two of which are records.
* The game in which he scored 50 goals in 39 games, he scored 5 goals. The game before, he scored 4 goals. Going into the 38th game, he "only" had 41 goals. Who would have thought he would have scored 9 over the next two games.
* One night against St. Louis, he scored twice off the face off, and once from behind the net. He had the puck behind the net for about two minutes, and no one was rushing him, but all passing lanes were being blocked. So what did he do? He fliped the puck over the back of the net, off Mike Liut's back and into the net.
* When with LA, one night he batted the puck right out of mid air, chest high, from the top of the face-off circle and into the top corner against Kirk McLean. It was like a home run. Many called it the best goal he'd ever scored.
There are a LOT more amazing facts about Gretzky, but we'd need 99 years to list them all. Feel free to add to the list. The true mark of his genius doesn't rest in the numbers though. Go back and watch some tapes. It was more than just his innate passing. It was the way he manipulated the movement of time in a game. He slowed things down, and sped them up according to his liking. Things looked like they were choreographed as he played, like they were being manufactured just for him. No one could touch Gretzky because he existed and played in a differnet pocket of ice than anyone else did, and that pocket was his little time zone, which changed as he dictated the patterns of the game, micro-second by micro-second. Yes, go back and watch a tape that you've never seen before. That's the only way you'll be able to appreciate Gretzky's genius, because it was always in the here and now - that feeling that he was going to do something, but you didn't know what - where he'd always create something. Usually out of nothing. When he was on, it was like magic.
* No one has ever had a 200 point season except for Gretzky, and Gretzky had 4 of them.
* 5 times in Gretzky's career, he won the scoring title on his assists alone.
* He scored by far the most goals in NHL history (894), but if you took them ALL away, he'd still be the all time leading points scorer based on his assists alone.
* He has well over a 1000 more points than the 2nd leading scorer of all time.
* In the 80s, he usually won the scoring title by about 80 points, even when Lemieux was playing.
* People said that he scored a lot ONLY because he had a great team to play with. If that is true, why did he have about a 100 points more than the 2nd leading scorer on the Oilers, year after year?
* When Gretzky was taken off the Stanley Cup champions (the Oilers) and placed on the 4th worst team in the league from the year before (the LA Kings), he beat his old team (the Oilers) in the playoffs that very year! That should be proof enough of his greatness, right there.
* Gretzky won 3 scoring titles while playing wih the LA Kings (so there goes that whole "he needed great players to play with" argument).
* When Gretzky and Lemieux were both in their primes, they played together in the Canada Cup. Who led the team in scoring? Gretzky.
* Had Gretzky played 82 games in 1983-84, he would have scored 221 points.
* From 81-82 until 86-87 (six seasons), he AVERAGED over 200 points per year - six seasons!
* In the 84-85 playoffs, Gretzky scored 47 points in only 18 games. Unreal.
* He had 50 hat tricks. The last one came when he was 37, against the Vancouver Canucks. He had 5 points. The 3rd goal was like something out of a cartoon. He slowed the game down, and then watched players fall and stumble all around him, including Kirk McLean, and skated behind the net in slow motion and popped it into the open side on the back hand like there was nothing to it. Even the Vancouver fans gave him a standing ovatation after that one.
* True, he did score 92 goals in a season, but do you know who scored the second most? Gretzky: 87 goals.
* Gretzky scored 50 goals in less than 50 games 3 times - two of which are records.
* The game in which he scored 50 goals in 39 games, he scored 5 goals. The game before, he scored 4 goals. Going into the 38th game, he "only" had 41 goals. Who would have thought he would have scored 9 over the next two games.
* One night against St. Louis, he scored twice off the face off, and once from behind the net. He had the puck behind the net for about two minutes, and no one was rushing him, but all passing lanes were being blocked. So what did he do? He fliped the puck over the back of the net, off Mike Liut's back and into the net.
* When with LA, one night he batted the puck right out of mid air, chest high, from the top of the face-off circle and into the top corner against Kirk McLean. It was like a home run. Many called it the best goal he'd ever scored.
There are a LOT more amazing facts about Gretzky, but we'd need 99 years to list them all. Feel free to add to the list. The true mark of his genius doesn't rest in the numbers though. Go back and watch some tapes. It was more than just his innate passing. It was the way he manipulated the movement of time in a game. He slowed things down, and sped them up according to his liking. Things looked like they were choreographed as he played, like they were being manufactured just for him. No one could touch Gretzky because he existed and played in a differnet pocket of ice than anyone else did, and that pocket was his little time zone, which changed as he dictated the patterns of the game, micro-second by micro-second. Yes, go back and watch a tape that you've never seen before. That's the only way you'll be able to appreciate Gretzky's genius, because it was always in the here and now - that feeling that he was going to do something, but you didn't know what - where he'd always create something. Usually out of nothing. When he was on, it was like magic.
