He’s Still Picasso on Ice

The play was pure Picasso.

Wayne Gretzky moved up the right board, delayed--just for a heartbeat--before crossing the blue line, silkily turned toward the crush of bodies at center ice. As defenders converged on him, he gave a slight head fake, as if to pass left off his forehand.

Then, just as quickly, he delivered a delicate little backhand flip to a wide open Niklas Sundstrom, who was trailing the play. As Anaheim Mighty Ducks defenders suddenly found themselves on webbed feet, Sundstrom snapped the puck to Ulf Samuelsson, who scored.

The wizardry of Gretzky’s play--his 1,851st NHL assist, more than anyone’s combined total of goals and assists in history--got the Madison Square Garden crowd chanting his name for a full two minutes.

It also raised the simplest of questions: How do you stop moves like that, short of chaining the guy to a dressing-room wall before the game?

The definitive answer is as hard to pin down as the man himself.

“He’s elusive, you know what I mean? He’s not talented, he’s gifted,” says his coach, Colin Campbell of the New York Rangers, who as a player was one in a long line of duckpin defensemen who fell to the Great One’s moves. “The assembly line for hockey players stopped when it got to him, and they just kept pouring in the passing ingredients. And the thing is, the strangest part is that you can’t even begin to describe how he makes the puck go from blade to blade. He doesn’t make hard, crisp passes. The puck wobbles or rolls, it’s an alley-oop or a bouncing thing--but it always gets there and you can’t stop it.”

“How can you stop a guy who disappears on you?” Philadelphia Flyers Coach Wayne Cashman says. “You don’t. You just hope for the best. I saw him in a game once where a huge defenseman was going to put the biggest hit in the world on him. You know what Gretzky did? He passed the guy the puck. He was so surprised it stopped him in his tracks. Then Gretzky flipped up the guy’s stick, took the puck, went right around him--and was gone!”

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Through the first month of the season, Gretzky led the Rangers in scoring--though Niklas Sundstrom and the resurgent Pat Lafontaine were right on his heels. But the Great One hasn’t cracked the top 20 in the league, and the team he leads has struggled.

The Rangers hear the jeers and taunts of Islanders fans--as of last Thursday, they trailed their detested cross-Sound rivals in the Atlantic division for the first time in years.

One thing is certain. The team’s playoff aspirations will go as far as Gretzky’s brains and aging legs can carry them. He still is to hockey what Michael Jordan is to basketball--and for that reason, corralling him remains as much a problem as ever.

Gretzky will be 37 in January. He obviously is not the player he was when he rang up a string of 200-plus point scoring seasons with the Edmonton Oilers back in the ‘80s. He does not have the one-on-one speed and power of Jaromir Jagr or Eric Lindros.

Others have become more prolific goal scorers, have harder shots on net, more size, more muscle, more youth . . .

But whether he is the Greatest Ever or, as one player put it, merely the greatest player in the game, Gretzky is a force to reckon with every time he steps on the ice.

“There’s no way to really stop him,” New Jersey Devils defenseman Ken Daneyko says. “If we knew how, we’d put it in a bottle and sell it.”

Gretzky still sees the ice the way Jordan sees the basketball court. He knows where everyone is at all times. He may or may not have X-ray vision, but it is clear the way he sees allows him to do special things.

As he puts it himself: “Everybody has their theories about seeing from above the action or being able to slow down the play. Actually I think it’s a combination of everything. But I think first and foremost it’s an instinct about the game.”

Instinct, as Gretzky uses the word, is the magic act at the end of long, hard study. The moves and tendencies of every player, every team have been burned into the brain as so many bytes of memory, to be processed at just the right split second.

“Years ago, I either read or heard that Gretzky said he had a hundred options every time he had the puck,” Cashman says. “And you know what, with him it’s true. You simply can’t set up against him. You think you can, but you can’t.”

So, what can you do?

“You can’t double him because that means you’re leaving someone open,” Luke Richardson says. “You have to play him one-on-one.”

Currently with the Flyers, Richardson remembers that when he was with the Oilers after Gretzky’s trade to the Los Angeles Kings the strategy was to attach Gretzky’s old teammate Esa Tikkanen to him at the blue line--and shadow him everywhere. “It worked for a while,” Richardson says. “Esa stuck to him like glue but couldn’t do it for too long, because what Gretzky would do would be to move over and shadow a defenseman--he would create his own double coverage and open things up.”

“Guarding Gretzky is so tough because he’s going to find an open player,” Devils defenseman Scott Niedermayer says.

“You can’t guess or anticipate with him because he’s got so many options, and what that means is that you have to really make sure that everyone else on the ice is really covered. You defend against him by defending against everyone else.”

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For years, Gretzky has made a living by uniquely positioning himself behind the net, a nearly impossible challenge for defenders. Skaters who want to challenge him find themselves obstructed by the goal itself. Defensemen end up stuck in traffic jams, goalies turn into contortionists trying to pay attention to him and possible plays in front of the net.

“I’ve got to keep my eyes on him. I can’t look in front and yet I have to rely on my teammates to take care of him, to make sure he doesn’t stuff it or find someone open,” Devils goalie Martin Brodeur says.

Mike Richter, before he was the Great One’s teammate, went nuts trying to stop him from behind. “When he’s back there you have to leave all your options open. I can’t even assume he won’t shoot the puck at me,” Richter says. “You think there’s no way, you look to the two big forwards bearing down in front, and then he goes boink! He’ll carom it in off my skate--he’s actually done that.”

Is there anything defenses can do to stop him behind the net?

Yes, Daneyko says. You get there before he has a chance to get his stick on anything. His teammates are looking to wrap the puck around the boards to him, and the only chance you have is to intercept it or deflect it before it gets there. Once he’s back there and he’s got it, he’s just too dangerous.

*

When I sit down to talk with Gretzky one quiet Monday morning, he looks more like the survivor of a small Balkan war than Picasso or the MJ of the NHL.

He says he always has used the net like a pick in basketball, so defenders can’t get to him. He rues the day when the league may move the net further out from the boards. “If they do that, I hope it is when my era is over,” he says.

He talks about that patented Houdini carom shot off the lower rim of the net and the netting itself, out to a waiting teammate. “I learned that from years of practice,” he says. “When I first came into the league, they used to have the big round nets in the back. Mess (then-teammate Mark Messier) and I, we’d throw pucks off the net in practice all the time just to get a feel for where it was going to go and what would happen.”

I ask Gretzky how he would guard himself, and what teams and players were toughest for him. He spoke not of teams, more of arenas. The old Boston Garden, for example, never was a place he felt comfortable. “One was that I played a lot against Ray Bourque,” he says. “I had to face Steve Kasper as a shadow, and in that small rink there just weren’t too many places to go.”

Players in the present?

“The hardest for me are the guys who can skate well. There was a time, I guess, when they put big guys on me, tough guys. I can elude them pretty easily. Eventually I can make them crack. The toughest for me are the ones who aren’t necessarily physical but who are smart and who have good lateral movement--a guy like Chris Chelios. He’s probably the best I’ve had to face in my career.”

Gretzky thinks goalies are bigger, faster, stronger now than they used to be--and therefore tougher. “They are athletes now, not just men in goal,” he says. “Today, the ninth-, the 10th-best goalies in the league are still going to test you. Andy Moog, for instance. A lot of people don’t put him in their top 10, but he’s as good a goalie as you’re going to find day in and day out.”

And about that play Wayne Cashman mentioned, where he avoided a big hit by suddenly passing the puck to an onrushing defender, whom he then stripped and went around?

“Don’t remember it,” he says with a Cheshire cat smile. “But that’s not bad; I like it, I think maybe I’ll try it.”

It is hard to think of the Rangers’ fortunes this year without Gretzky. It is harder still to gauge just how far he can take them. As it was in 1978--his first pro season with Indianapolis, then Edmonton of the World Hockey Association--so it remains today, but with a less-talented supporting cast.

“Wayne is such a great player, he makes all the other players around him that much better,” says teammate and All-Star defenseman Brian Leetch.

The Rangers of 1997-98 clearly are not the Oilers of 1978-79. So it is a tribute to Gretzky that the question of just how far the Rangers will go this spring still so largely depends on him.