“The Finnish journalist names his favorites, but says Wayne Gretzky stands alone.“

The whole piece from the above link or after the jump.

The torch
I’ve often been surprised at the various speculations of who the best player ever is. Even if I can understand that Mario’s always carrying that asterisk on his back, as in, “Mario Lemieux is the greatest player ever*,” where the * refers to the fact that he never played all 82/84 games in the regular season.

So, had he been healthy he might have broken Gretzky’s records.

But for me, Gretzky is hands down the greatest player ever. He’s got the stats, the Cup rings, the Canada Cup trophies, and 20 prize cars to show for it.

Naturally, he is also the player of my generation. I’m not sure if that’s what we call the “modern era” of the NHL, or if the modern era belongs to somebody else. Maybe it does, maybe not. Maybe Crosby’s NHL is already a postmodern one.

Mark Messier’s number was retired in Edmonton yesterday. Gretzky was there, as was Jari Kurri, Gretzky’s and Messier’s teammate in the golden 80s.
(Full disclosure: I am writing this in an Oilers sweater, to honor The Captain). Those three, plus Paul Coffey, were all the names I needed for my play-by-plays in the early 1980s.

However, in 1977, when Team Canada had returned to the World Championships, and when the IIHF rules demanded that even the great Phil Esposito wear a helmet, I had never heard of Wayne Gretzky.

There was another player on the Canadian team that caught my eye, and who became my idol: Marcel Dionne. He was short, yes, but he was strong as an oak tree. The Finnish papers wrote stories about his strong forearms, and I remember staring at mine, and then picking up two Cooper exercise foams and squeezing them while watching the games on TV.

In those days, kids in Finland knew only a few things about the NHL. One of them was that Bobby Hull had the hardest slap shot in the world, and once, when he really ripped a good one, the puck went through the goalie’s glove, through the net, through the boards and hit the goal judge in the shin, and broke the bone. (Note to NHL: Put that one on YouTube!)

To this day, I only have asked one player for his autograph. Marcel Dionne was working a booth at the Canadian Sports Show in the late 1990s, and I got his autograph. His arms were still huge.

I was reminded of all this when I happened to see a young fan ask for information about Gretzky on a Finnish hockey forum.

“Why was Cretzky (sic) so good?”

One of the replies involved a scoring system, similar to the EA NHL game, breaking down all the attributes in a player from skating to passing to stamina.

It was a revelation to me. In 30 years, somebody somewhere will probably be asking other hockey fans, “What was it that made Krosbie so great?”

Rules change, players change, teams come and go. But the game stays.