I Promised Mess I Wouldn't Write This

Everyone's talking about the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Gretzky trade today.  As they have been all this week leading up to the anniversary.  Because of the volume of media content delivered today, we'll probably spend more time discussing it now than we did at the time.

It's become accepted knowledge that the Gretzky trade grew the game in the USA, and led to the expansion of the league throughout the American south.  Indeed, that's the main thing that the reminiscences just keep repeating over and over.  Some have even implied that LA's recent cup win was somehow related to the trade.

I'm not so convinced that the trade had much to do with the American expansion.  After all, the expansion was based so much on either sheer demographics, or on imaginary and assumed support, it's hard to link it to any real predecessor.

I wonder if the Gretzky trade might even have hurt the league's marketing: essentially, the NHL conducted a giant bait-and-switch with the US over the course of the 80's and 90's: Gretzky and Lemieux grabbed unprecedented exposure for hockey in the US, but introduced it as a fast-moving sport of individual offensive skill, akin to contemporary Jordan-era basketball.  Then the league expanded its American presence, just in time to introduce those new American fans to slow, boring, neutral-zone-trap hockey.  Hockey would have been better off being introduced as a rough, physical test right from the start.

So how would I memorialise the trade?  I'd compare and contrast it to Canada's biggest baseball trade two-and-a-half years later, in which the Jays sent Tony Fernandez and Fred McGriff to San Diego for Joe Carter and Roberto Alomar.  I remember some commentator recently describing that as the last "real" trade in baseball.  That is, two teams, dealing from similar positions of power, traded players of similar ability, with both teams simply trying to improve themselves.  Not counting minor trades of journeymen, that just doesn't happen any more.  If a player you've heard of gets moved, you just assume its because of contracts, or impending free agency.  Well, by the same token, the Gretzky trade was the first "unreal" trade: a team giving up a player they still wanted, getting much less in return, just because they didn't have a choice.