by Al Strachan
Keenan knew what he wanted. Gretzky knew what he wanted. But the Kings, lacking any experience in such matters, had no idea which way they should turn and were caught in an internal battle between their hockey people and their financial people.
McMaster, in only his second year in the NHL, was under the kind of intense media pressure that he had never encountered in junior hockey. Coach Larry Robinson, like the new owners, had been in place for only four months. As a result, the hockey people couldn’t make up their minds what they wanted, and the financial people couldn’t understand that deals can’t be done in a vacuum. If you get involved with big-time contracts during the season, it usually has a negative effect on the team.
So by this time, Gretzky was worn down physically and emotionally, McMaster was constantly flustered, the management couldn’t decide which move would be best in the long term, and the Kings were in the tank. Each game, there were thousands of empty seats in the Great Western Forum, and the Kings were giving every indication that they would miss the playoffs for the third consecutive year.
The only course of action that made sense was to put Gretzky up for auction and get the best possible package—and to do it quickly, because his contract was running out. Unfortunately for the Kings and their fans, there was no one in the team’s upper echelon with enough hockey acumen to get the ball rolling. Instead, they were seriously considering offering Gretzky a contract.
Why they would even think of doing that remains a mystery. Well, actually, it’s not a mystery. They simply didn’t understand the situation. The team needed a major overhaul, and the most valuable asset to deal was indisputably Gretzky. If they thought they could sign him and trade him at their leisure, they were wrong. But they didn’t know that. Every time Barnett was asked what Gretzky wanted, he told them to make an offer. In fact, Gretzky wanted a no-trade clause, thereby negating any sign-and-trade options for the Kings.
But the clock was ticking, and the longer the Kings waited, the less the Blues and the other suitors would offer.
Nevertheless, there followed a month that, from a psychological point of view, was probably the darkest of Gretzky’s career. No trade was made, and there were almost daily reports of yet another deal being put up for consideration.
In 2013, we spoke about that segment of his career, not one of the most pleasant. “My heart was in L.A. when I went there,” he said. “A lot of people say I went there to change hockey. Well, I didn’t go there to change hockey. That was never ever in my mind. We went there to win a Stanley Cup and we were so close and we had such a great bunch of guys and Barry was such a great coach. Then it just sort of all unravelled, and then Bruce started to get into his trouble.
“I felt sick and bad for him with what he was going through, and I had so much respect for Larry Robinson, who took over from Barry as coach. Larry and I had played together and he was always so good to me. When he became coach, he was always honest with me.
“He said we had had a good year, and I understood that. When I met with the ownership of the Kings, they said, ‘What do you want to do? Do you want to re-sign? We’re thinking of going young.’
“I said, ‘Hey listen, you guys have to go young. You can’t patch this together to make a championship team.’
“I was devastated from the point of view that I felt I’d failed by not bringing them a championship. It bothered me in the sense that I knew I had to go and I knew that it was the right decision for the organization. But I was such a good friend of Larry. Larry and I had been teammates; it was a tough scenario for him, too, not just for me.”
Gretzky remains close to Robinson, who, at the time we were speaking, was in his first year as an assistant coach with the San Jose Sharks. “Larry loves hockey,” said Gretzky. “He’ll do a great job in San Jose. All he does is win Stanley Cups. They couldn’t have a better teacher than Larry. He helped me as a player and he helped me as a coach.”
The state of affairs in Los Angeles during the 1996 negotiations was murky, to say the least. The general manager was telling his colleagues that he was accepting bids for Gretzky. The team president said he was testing the market. But the man designated by the owners to run the team said Gretzky was going nowhere and the Kings wanted his name on a new contract.
Gretzky, because of his nature and his basic decency, said little, a fact that started the media vultures circling. He was accused of starting the rumours of his trade. In fact, the rumblings started when the Kings announced that they intended to have a top-level management meeting in early January to discuss his future.
He was accused of putting himself above the team. In fact, he approached the ownership in August and told them that, for the good of both parties, they should trade him if there were no immediate plans to build a winner. That stance made sense throughout the ordeal, but the team dragged its feet at his expense.
He was accused of manipulating the team. In fact, he was the one who was being manipulated. Team officials lied when they said they would build a Stanley Cup contender that season.
He deserved far better treatment than to be offered around the league like a fringe player with a hygiene problem. He deserved to be consulted as to his preference for a destination, should the bumblers who ran the Kings eventually find a way to finalize a deal. He deserved to have a swift conclusion to the deal, something that, as the matter dragged on and on, he finally requested publicly—but to no avail.
The situation became so unpleasant that his friend and teammate Marty McSorley spoke to me about it on the record—even though he was playing for the Kings at the time.
“I’ve heard a lot of people calling him selfish and self-centred and a lot of things like that,” McSorley said. “I think people fail to realize the whole scenario. He’s a total free agent this summer. If he were really self-centred and greedy, he wouldn’t be going to the team and saying, ‘Let’s get some players; I’d love to stay.’ Instead, he would wait until the summer when he’ll be a total free agent. Then, nobody’s going to say anything, because it’s done in all sports. When you’re a free agent, you have an opportunity to sign wherever you want for as much as you want.”
So why did Gretzky ask for a trade? “Because he feels he has a vested interest here in Los Angeles,” McSorley said. “He wants to see the team win. He meant no hostility.
“What people fail to realize is that Wayne is a winner. He hasn’t broken all the records and kept driving on just because he just puts his skates on. He’s a driven man and people still pay a lot of money to watch Wayne Gretzky play. The reason is that he wants to win a Stanley Cup. If he were less than that, if he were a guy who is just going to put his equipment on and not worry about winning, he wouldn’t have been such a great hockey player.”
As far as McSorley was concerned, Gretzky was trying to help the Kings, not hurt them. “It was a pretty simple statement he made,” McSorley said. “In a sense, Wayne gave the Los Angeles Kings a gift by saying, ‘If you’re not going to be in a position in the summer where it’s going to be attractive because we’re not going to be in a position to win, then get something for me.’
“What he was meaning to do was assist the L.A. Kings, not put a gun to anybody’s head.”
From the time Gretzky joined the Kings in 1988, he was perceived as a de facto general manager. McSorley said that was another unwarranted criticism. “People talk about Wayne running the show,” he said. “But the Kings traded Paul Coffey. They traded Tomas Sandstrom. They traded me [and then reacquired him]. Wayne never would have approved any of those trades.
“Wayne weathered the storm when Bruce McNall, his friend, had financial troubles. He weathered the team going bankrupt under Joe Cohen and Jeffrey Sudikoff” (who, like so many NHL owners, later went to prison. In his case it was a one-year term for insider trading).
“Finally, the team got into a position financially where they were talking about a new building. Everybody knows the Kings have stable ownership now. Wayne gave this team an
opportunity to get back on its feet. And now he’s getting all this criticism. It’s not right.”
Finally, six weeks after the story broke, more than five weeks after the meeting to determine the Kings’ course of action, and more than four weeks after the all-star weekend in which the matter was originally to be settled, the deal got done. More or less.
It was a Saturday night, and I was on a business trip to Kingston, Ontario. I’m not sure about the time—although it must have been before 2 a.m. because I subsequently called the story in to the Toronto Sun and beat the last deadline. I was already asleep when the phone rang and a familiar voice said, “It’s done.”
As it turned out, there was a bit more fiddling to do, but essentially, the trade was in place. Gretzky would go to St. Louis for three young players—Roman Vopat, Patrice Tardif and Craig Johnson—as well as a first-round draft pick in 1997.
The reason the trade didn’t get officially announced until four days later was that some internal financial details had to be worked out. One of them revolved around the fact that when Gretzky went to Los Angeles in 1988, Prime Ticket (which by that time had evolved into Prime Sports West) boosted its rights payments considerably, but threw in a clause saying that if Gretzky weren’t in the lineup, the TV revenue for that game would be halved. The longer Gretzky stayed in Los Angeles, the more the Kings received in TV revenue. On the other hand, if he were to stay past the trading deadline, the Kings would get no players in return. The corporate people wanted to drag the matter out a bit longer.
There was also the matter of settling Gretzky’s signing bonus and salary, much of which was deferred. He was still owed roughly two million dollars to complete the 1996 obligation, and there was also the matter of $20 million in deferred payments.
On the hockey front, Gretzky’s feeling was that if he was going to go to St. Louis, he wanted to get there as soon as possible. Conversely, the Kings wanted to get their new players into the lineup just as quickly. The Kings were in the midst of a rough season, but so were a number of their Western Conference competitors, and a playoff spot was still within reach.
With three effervescent youngsters added to the lineup, the spark could perhaps be enough to get the Kings back into playoff contention. But it was abundantly clear from the team’s play during the Gretzky affair that until the matter was resolved, the Kings were going nowhere.
But even then, the matter wasn’t settled. The Kings had one more wrench to throw into the machinery. They refused to give Barnett permission to talk to the Blues.
The Blues, of course, wanted to sign Gretzky to a long-term deal. They certainly didn’t want to part with four bodies for a player who would be free to go back on the open market four months down the road.
Therefore, the trade could not be completed until the Blues and Barnett agreed to terms, something they could not do until they met. And they couldn’t meet until the Kings gave permission.
The Kings’ motivation was that they had decided to make one last-ditch offer to Gretzky: a ten-year deal.
By the Tuesday following the Saturday-night phone call, the deal had still not been finalized and the Kings were playing the Jets in Winnipeg. The next day, Gretzky was going to fly back to Los Angeles to meet with Sanderman to discuss the Kings’ proposal.
After the Jets game, the crowd had filed out of the Winnipeg Arena, and Gretzky and I stood in the penalty box talking—the only place where he could be sure that we were the only two taking part in the conversation.
“I’m not supposed to tell you everything that’s going on,” he said. “It’s pretty nearly done, but I promised them I wouldn’t say what’s happening.”
“Well, my only concern is that I’m not sure where to go next,” I told him. “I want to be there when you play your first game with your next team, but I don’t want to be flying all over the continent while it drags on.”
He winked. “Be in Vancouver on Friday,” he said. “I’ll see you there.”
The Blues were playing in Vancouver on Friday.
CHAPTER TWENTY
On Thursday, the deal was finally announced, and that afternoon, I was sitting in my hotel room in Vancouver when Gretzky called from his home in Encino.
“I’m ecstatic,” he said. “I’m thrilled to be going there. It’s going to be exciting.”
The long-awaited deal was the one that had been announced earlier, with a slight change. When McMaster saw that the details had been revealed in the Sunday Sun, he insisted that Keenan throw in a later-round draft pick just so that the Sun couldn’t brag that it had nailed the deal. He wanted a fourth-rounder, but Keenan insisted on nothing higher than a fifth-rounder, and McMaster settled for that.
With the deal done, Gretzky was finally free to give his side of the affair, something he had been unable to do while under contract with the Kings. He said the split was more of a philosophical disagreement than a financial one. Under his original Kings contract, much of his salary was deferred, and in the previous August, when the sale of the team to the Anschutz Entertainment Group came about, a clause in the contract gave him the right to be paid immediately, instead of down the road.
But Anschutz wanted to keep the deferral clause in place. “They told me they wanted to go out and get players, and I said that was fine by me. I wanted to make it work. We started out pretty well, but I didn’t see any new players coming in.”
By late November, the Kings were fading noticeably and the media were asking Gretzky about his future, questions he repeatedly dodged.
Throughout December, McMaster and Keenan talked frequently, and Gretzky, who rarely missed any worthwhile NHL gossip, was fully aware of it. Meanwhile, his relationship with the Kings was deteriorating. “I said, ‘Well, you promised me since August—and that’s why I deferred so much money—that you’d buy some players or dip into the free-agent market.’
“But they didn’t. They just said, ‘Trust us.’
“I couldn’t do that anymore. I thought that this time, I needed some proof before I signed. They had been saying since August that something was going to happen.”
With a stalemate appearing to be looming, Gretzky finally made a proposal: “I told them, ‘Let me play until July 1 [when he would become a free agent without compensation] and I’ll give you first priority [on the new deal]. This is where I want to play. This is my home. I don’t want to pack up and move.’
“That’s when they made it clear to me that wasn’t an option,” Gretzky said. “I was a little hurt that people were saying that it was just over money and that I was being greedy,” he continued. “I deferred close to 70 per cent of my salary. Here’s a guy [Anschutz] who just got a cheque for $1 billion [in a Los Angeles land deal], who paid $115 million for the franchise, and who’s talking about a new stadium for $250 million, and he asks me to defer my money.
“I said, ‘No problem,’ and I did it. For people to say it was just over money, it was ridiculous. That part hurt me the most.”
Gretzky didn’t know who his Blues linemates would be, but when I told him that Keenan had already suggested it would be Brett Hull and Shayne Corson, he replied, “I sure hope so.
“I’m ecstatic about being able to play for Mike,” he said, “and I’m looking forward to playing with Brett. He and I are friends, and I’ve talked to him many times over the past few weeks. I had dinner with him after the game Saturday. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I wouldn’t talk to Mike or anybody else in the Blues organization.”
Hull was just as delighted about the deal as Gretzky was. “He adds a dimension that I don’t think anybody understands in St. Louis,” he said at a press conference in St. Louis.
Keenan was relieved to have pulled off the deal. “I worked on that thing every day for two months,” he said in a 2012 interview. “They were nervous. Sam McMaster had experience in junior hockey, but he didn’t have much experience at the NHL level. I had to give him a verbal water-boarding to keep him on track every day until he finally
gave in.”
As a measure of the respect that Gretzky’s new St. Louis teammates accorded him, Corson announced he had relinquished his captaincy of the Blues and had handed it over to Gretzky.
In the midst of all the optimism in the St. Louis organization, it went almost unnoticed that the Blues were so frustrated in their dealings with the Kings and so impatient to end the wait that they never did have any contract talks with Barnett. They would later regret that decision.
There was another nagging question: If Gretzky was so eager to win another Stanley Cup, why would he go to the Blues, who were a .500 hockey team? “Well, the first thing I would say,” Keenan remarked as we chatted on the bus to the rink for Gretzky’s first practice with his new team, “is that there has been an excessive number of injuries and they were a new team to begin with, so they really haven’t had a chance to jell.”
With Gretzky in the lineup, Keenan saw nothing but a bright future. He said it was not unreasonable to assume that Gretzky’s presence could boost the Blues’ output by a goal a game on average.
“If we had, at this point after sixty games, sixty more goals on the ledger, we might have twenty-five more points,” he speculated.
“Brett Hull’s value just went up immensely,” Keenan said, “because now he has someone who sees the same hockey game that he sees. That’s a big plus.”
And let’s face it, Gretzky had an impact on all the players, not just the stars. “There are all the subtleties,” Keenan said. “All the subtle little things that already are having an impact. One guy came up to me, and I won’t identify who it is—oh, maybe I’ll tell you. It was Tony Twist. Normally, the guys wear jeans to practice, but he said, ‘Maybe we should get dressed up today because this is special.’ That’s a subtlety that surfaced right away. It shows Wayne’s presence and the respect that the players have for him.
