Goalies Can't Turn Their Backs On Him
MONTREAL — Wayne Gretzky didn't discover the little slab of ice behind the net. Bobby Clarke, the old Philadelphia Flyer, did.
Gretzky just made it fashionable. Set up shop there, set down an easy chair. Also built a shelf that, to date, holds four Stanley Cups but has room for five.
Along the way, Gretzky made it the most dangerous place in sports. He and the Kings jumped Montreal from behind Tuesday, winning 4-1 in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup finals.
“You weren't supposed to go behind the net before,” Gretzky recalled Monday. “Everybody wanted you to be Phil Esposito.
“They didn't realize Phil Esposito was 6-2 and weighed over 200 pounds. Not everybody is. 1 had to go about it differently.”
He found gold there. He also drove up the blood pressure of every National Hockey League goalie.
What other athlete faces — or, in this case, doesn't face — such a predicament?
In what other sport is your back turned to the athlete — in this case, the world's greatest — you are supposed to defend?
“You just have to keep your head on a swivel,” said Kings goalie Kelly Hrudey, bedeviled by the invisible Doug Gilmour throughout the Campbell Conference finals. “You have to count on your defensemen to get rid of the puck, and get rid of the guys in front of you trying to score.
“There's no time for communication. It happens too quickly. At the end of Game 7, Gilmour was behind in the last minute. It got pretty hairy.”
Clarke was famous for quick, wraparound goals from behind the net. Gretzky, as is his way, pushed the possibilities. He knows a loose puck in front of the net is like a rattlesnake, and the best way to get it there is from behind.
The goal that put Toronto down 5-3 Saturday night came from Gretzky, behind the net, off the skate of Leafs defenseman Dave Ellett and past Felix Potvin.
Anyone else, you'd say it was luck.
Gretzky? You found yourself having to ask.
“I thought about telling everyone that I did it deliberately,” Gretzky said. “That I saw Ellett there and I flipped it, off the backhand, against him and in.
“If it had been a forehand? I've scored like that before. But this was just luck. What happened was, Toronto was changing lines, and I just wanted to flip the puck out there somewhere, and Ellett was in the way. Todd Gill took me out of the play. So I never saw it. I would like to say I planned it, but I didn't.”
How to stop it?
“You're not supposed to send a defenseman behind the net,” Kings assistant coach Cap Raeder said. “But you can't have him stand there at either post. Then the middle is open. We've been very effective with Warren Rychel, playing with Wayne and just fighting for position in front. He's scored quite a bit that way.
“The best thing, always, with the great players is get to them quick. Flush them out. Don't let them stand and stand and stand and play off your decisions.”
But when the Kings are on the power play, there is no one to evict Gretzky. The Canadiens are nervous about that and everything else. They would have been much more settled against the pedestrian Leafs. This is like preparing for a motorcycle gang.
Young Stephan Lebeau announced Sunday that Gretzky “is no longer my idol” and, to prove it, renamed his cats. They once were Wayne and Janet (Wayne's wife).
Now they are Savvy and Mona, named for Mr. and Mrs. Denis Savard.
Gretzky said the pressure is always on him — “more than Mario Lemieux, Eric Lindros or any other player” — but his back is now strong enough to handle it. How soon we forget that Gretzky played only 44 games and scored 15 goals. No wonder the Kings were only third in the Smythe Division.
“One on one, Wayne is not the best player in the game,” Kings broadcaster Jim Fox said. “But two on two, he is. And the more people you add, the more options he has.”
“I know that it's hard to coach Wayne Gretzky, just like it's hard to be Wayne Gretzky,” said the third person himself.