The Contradictions of Pro Hockey in Los Angeles

Pro hockey in Los Angeles has for 20-some years been one of those contradictions word-elitists call an oxymoron. Something on the order of being a casual addict or looking forward to a pleasant August in Washington.

Until they traded for hockey’s king Tuesday, the only Kings’ line worth savoring had been the one from a former owner, Jack Kent Cooke.

About the time Wayne Gretzky was lacing on his first pair of skates, Cooke looked about his near-empty Forum and made this telling observation: 250,000 native Canadians were residing in Southern California and he’d just figured out why.

They all hated hockey.

Gretzky changes that. The way many tell it, the Kings could pair Gretzky with Sean Penn and Roger Rabbit and still glide deep into the Stanley Cup playoffs.

He’s the best.

Ever.

Magic Johnson with a stick, some say, the sort of assist machine who could set up his own goalie for a wide-open shot should the circumstances strike him as proper. In exchange for Gretzky and a couple of Edmonton buddies, the Kings parted with: a 20-year-old scorer, what amounts to four first-round draft choices and ... and. ...

“In excess of $10 million.”

As the movie crowd might say, that seems a tad over budget. Hell, Alaska went for less. And all that $10 mil-plus gets the Kings is the privilege of paying Gretzky the fair wage he’s earned as the most valuable player in the National Hockey League eight of his nine seasons: $900,000 a year.

The economics seem goofy for a change. Most of the time stars of Gretzky’s magnitude more than pay for themselves. With the expected 5,000-person increase in crowds, from an average of about 11,000 last year to the 16,005 capacity, the Kings would more than pay Gretzky’s salary.

Where they make up the $10 million is a mystery. USA Today determined that Babe Ruth only would have commanded about $2.4 million in cash and loans from the Yankees to the Red Sox in 1988 dollars.

Just guessing (as I always do with hockey) but Edmonton seems the clear winner. They have gotten two excellent young players, the rights to three others and the means to scour the universe for even more.

The Kings are praying that Gretzky will alter attitudes, that matrons on Rodeo Drive and the beach crowd suddenly routinely will say to each other: “Let’s do hockey tonight. Eh?”

For the cerebral of sport, this is close to the ultimate in dreamy grand experiments. Who has not fantasized, at some point: how much difference does one player make in a team game? Specifically, would Magic cause a monumental turnaround with the Bullets? Or Dan Marino with the Packers?

Gretzky gives us much grist to grind.

Here is the man, only 27, mainly responsible for the Oilers winning four of the last five Stanley Cups joining a team that only made the playoffs two of the last six seasons.

For small clues as to how the Kings might fare with Gretzky, we need look no farther than across the Forum, to the Lakers when in June of 1975 they traded for 28-year-old Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

This was a players-for-players deal with the Milwaukee Bucks. No draft choices. Five seasons later, with three of those Laker acquisitions still double-figure scorers, the Bucks finished the regular season with a 49-33 record and advanced to the Western Conference semifinals.

The Lakers, during that 1979-1980 season, captured the NBA championship. They won 60 games during the regular season and beat the 76ers, four games to two, for the title.

But how much of a factor was Abdul-Jabbar during those first four seasons -- and that final rush to glory? In his first year with them, the Lakers won 10 more games than they had the season before. They still finished two games below .500.

The next three years, the Lakers won 53, 45 and 47 games. In the playoffs after those respective seasons, they: lost (to eventual champion Portland) in the conference finals, lost in the first round and lost in the conference semifinals.

Even with Abdul-Jabbar paired with good players, the Lakers were a couple of rungs from the top. They vaulted over with the addition of Magic Johnson; they have stayed there, mostly, with Magic and the addition of James Worthy.

The lesson is that wondrous players can lift a lousy team only so far. The Lakers got to be a dynasty only after slickering other teams into trading for the first picks in the 1979 (Johnson) and 1982 (Worthy) drafts.

For Gretzky, the Kings did retain their first-round choices in the 1990 and 1992 drafts. By the 1993 season, however, Gretzky will be over 30; also, the Kings just might be good enough to select only ordinary prospects with those first-round choices.

Los Angeles surely will not turn Gretzky’s head, for he already knows the demands of celebrity. He is anything but a star-struck young man chasing a starlet to Hollywood. How well he holds up under the pressure of being bumped more and playing more, as the Kings’ lone star, will be more critical.

Because he achieved so much so soon, might Gretzky not become hockey-old before his time? An athlete can endure only so many major-league bruises.

The Oilers are determined to stay serious contenders for the Cup. Trading Gretzky was the megaton bomb the team dropped on its fans slightly more than eight months after that huge explosion involving Paul Coffey.

With the fine young players that trade got them from Pittsburgh, plus the five valuable properties from Los Angeles, plus their own first-round choices, the Oilers just might be that rare team capable of dominating back-to-back decades.

We’ll see.