Wayne Gretzky's assists alone outnumber anyone else's total points
Wayne Gretzky set up so many goals that his assists by themselves exceed the career points of any other NHL player. Small and not especially strong, he won by reading the game, skating to where the puck was heading. When he retired in 1999, he held 61 league records.
Born in 1961 in Brantford, Ontario, he grew up in a house his parents chose partly because the yard was flat enough to flood for ice. His father Walter, a Bell Telephone worker, built a backyard rink the family nicknamed the Wally Coliseum and ran drills around bleach bottles and tin cans. His advice was to skate toward where the puck was going, not where it had been. Wayne first skated at his grandparents' farm at two years and ten months.
At six he played on a team of ten-year-olds whose jerseys drowned him, so he tucked one side into his trousers, a habit he kept throughout his professional career. In one season at age ten he scored 378 goals, and he passed 1,000 goals by 13, attracting jealousy from other parents and newspaper profiles. He led scoring at the 1978 World Junior Championships, then joined the Indianapolis Racers of the rival WHA before being traded to Edmonton.
With the Oilers he won four Stanley Cups in ten seasons. A trade to Los Angeles took the Kings to the 1993 Cup Final and is credited with popularising hockey in California, and he finished with St. Louis and the New York Rangers. He is the only player to top 200 points in a season, which he did four times, and he passed 100 points in 15 professional seasons. His habit of lurking behind the opponents' goal earned the spot the name Gretzky's office. He won nine most-valuable-player awards and five sportsmanship trophies, and spoke out against fighting.
The Hall of Fame waived its usual waiting period and inducted him straight away, and the league retired his number 99 across every team. He ran Canada's gold-winning men's team at the 2002 Olympics, part-owned and coached the Phoenix Coyotes until their 2009 bankruptcy, and later became an Oilers executive before joining Turner Sports as an analyst in 2021.
Source: Wayne Gretzky
