This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.
I was tearing basil leaves into tiny little pieces when Wayne Gretzky called from the back of a limousine cruising to a Los Angeles airport. It was a matter of life or death: for him, a new hockey life; for me the death of a perfectly good tomato sauce. It was Feb. 27, 1996, not quite up against the trade deadline but with it clear on the horizon. What had been unthinkable only months before had become almost inevitable: The owner of just about every scoring record in the game was going to be traded. Gretzky had expressed his desire to play for a contender and the Kings weren’t one. His contract was expiring that summer. All the ingredients for a trade were there. It was just a matter of when, and when turned out to be the exact moment the kitchen was turned upside down and the sauce was simmering.
Gretzky was far from the first NHL trade-deadline deal. The record books might be a bit vague on this point, but most cite the trade of another member of the Kings, a very good but not Great centre, as the first seismic deal made late in a season: After playing in 69 games for L.A., Butch Goring moved from one coast to another on March 10, 1980, joining the New York Islanders and becoming a catalyst for their dynastic run of the early ’80s, winning the Conn Smythe Trophy with their second championship team. Still, Gretzky moving prior to the deadline didn’t establish new limits on the scale of deadline trades. It simply eradicated all of them. The take-away: If Gretzky can be moved, anyone can. How large a player loomed in a team’s lore mattered not.
When the Bruins sent Ray Bourque to the Avalanche in March 2000, it wasn’t a matter-of-fact proposition but a matter of course, even for a first-ballot Hall of Famer. The biggest can and will go. If the desire is there, a deal will get done, unless there is a nettlesome no-trade clause. Even at that, for love and/or money, a star might waive a no-trade (although fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs still recall the “Muskoka Five” with no particular fondness). Funny how things go: Whenever a trade deadline looms, I crave tomato sauce; whenever I smell basil I think about Gretzky in a St. Louis Blues sweater, an image that has been wiped from almost everybody’s memory bank. An even funnier thing: It wound up being a trade of almost no consequence, certainly no lasting effect. Los Angeles ended up with Craig Johnson, Roman Vopat, Patrice Tardif and first- and fifth-round picks: Johnson stuck around a few seasons as a journeyman-at-best winger; Vopat made it into 57 games for the Kings before moving on; and Tardif played 15 games for L.A. that spring and not another in the NHL. Likewise, the picks washed out: Matt Zultek (15th overall) and Peter Hogan (123rd) never made the NHL. Gretzky’s time in St. Louis was more interesting—a chance to play with Brett Hull on his wing and deal with the combustible Mike Keenan behind the bench—but only barely more consequential than the Kings’ end of the deal. The Blues were knocked out of the playoffs by Detroit and later pulled off the table a contract that would have paid Gretzky more than $22 million over its three-year term. Gretzky instead signed with the Rangers that summer and he finished out his career in New York. Big picture: The greatest player of his generation was one half of what turned out to be, long term, a nothing-for-nothing deal. Keenan was axed in St. Louis. GM Sam McMaster was done for in L.A. The deal was a bombshell when dropped. And in the aftermath lay a wasteland.
All this provides a teachable lesson, namely that precious few trades live up to the noise and hype around them, those often being the ones you hadn’t considered. Only in the matter of deadline deals can you say Butch Goring is greater than No. 99. One of the much-hyped deals at the deadline last year, the Kings acquiring Jeff Carter for Jack Johnson and a conditional first-rounder, looked like a master stroke when captain Dustin Brown raised the Cup at the Staples Center last June. At least it did from a distance. Even though the trade would have to rank as the biggest in the six weeks leading up to a sedate deadline day, it’s hard to make a case that Carter was the difference between a championship and something less. He played a smaller role in the post-season than did Brown, himself a subject of conjecture and trade rumours in advance of the deadline. When the deal was struck, Carter took a few knocks for playing too well after changing sweaters, elevating the game that he had shown the Columbus Blue Jackets in his oh-so-brief time there. At least that’s how it was perceived, probably unfairly. It was far easier to seem effective and appear enthusiastic with a championship team than with a 29th-place train wreck. As far as production goes it was a wash: He was within a goal or two of a 30-goal pace at either end of the trade. Even if he did in fact raise his play, there’d be no blaming him. A deadline deal provides a tonic to the player acquired by the buyer in the transaction.
That was driven home for me when Gretzky called that night. His words might have been smeared with tomato paste in my notebook but they still jumped off the page. I asked him what effect the trade might end up having on his career. “I haven’t thought about how long I’m going to play but something like this can rekindle the fire,” Gretzky said, a tacit admission that things had gone so badly in L.A. that the fire was barely smouldering or had maybe even gone out. Yeah, he had played just about as much hockey as humanly possible over the course of his career, a lot of seasons that stretched deep into spring. Still, he was a 35-year-old. The fatigue in his voice made retirement sound like an imminent prospect. The leading scorer in the history of the game wasn’t undergoing a crisis of confidence but rather encountering trouble summoning the will to play, a worse thing by far.
Gretzky’s stay in St. Louis was brief but he was very good that spring, getting the Blues within a goal of the conference final. He went on to be a 90-point player in New York for the two seasons that followed, setting the stage for a distinguished way to close out his career. And ultimately, that’s the fascinating aspect of trade-deadline deals: the effect that they have on players moving on to better circumstances. Goring, the original deadline hero, had played well in L.A. but felt underappreciated because the Kings were well out of the spotlight. He raised his game with the Islanders. His fire had never burned so brightly. So too did Bourque play at a sublime level in Colorado that he might not have been able to sustain, emotionally at least, with a rebuilding team in Boston.
The GM who goes to the trade market as a buyer can look at a player he acquires not as-is but as-he-might-be. The Jarome Iginla who would go to Pittsburgh or Boston might not be the same player as in his prime, but it’s fair to assume that he’d be something more than the player in Calgary now. If the Flames were to tear the franchise down even further and deal Jay Bouwmeester, he might be like Goring, a player better than he had ever been before. Inevitably, talk winds around to winners and losers on deadline day, but the real winners are the players rescued from lost seasons and unpromising situations. This was the larger lesson from the call I got from Gretzky at a critical juncture in his career. A smaller lesson specific to those who track the comings and going in the NHL: If you need time to toil over a hot stove after your working day is at its end, wait until the day after the deadline.
Gare Joyce is the features editor at Sportsnet magazine
