"How dumb am I?" Gretzky passed on becoming part owner of Canucks
Could you imagine Wayne Gretzky playing for the Vancouver Canucks? Well, according to the Great One himself, it was almost a reality in the 1980s.
The NHL’s all-time leader in points, assists, and goals was on the latest episode of the Spittin Chiclets podcast, where he told a story about how he was offered a significant ownership portion of the Canucks if he signed with the team after winning the Stanley Cup in 1988.
“I talked to Nelson Skalbania all the time,” Gretzky told hosts Paul Bissonnette and Ryan Whitney. “He called me [at] 7 am when we won the Stanley Cup and said, ‘I am going to buy the Vancouver Canucks, I’ll give you 25% ownership of the team and $3 million a year.’
“The highest-paid player in hockey was me at that time, $800,000 Canadian.”
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For many, that would be too good to refuse, but Gretzky didn’t feel right about it, so he passed and was later traded to the Los Angeles Kings that summer. Looking back, it appears Gretzky might have some regrets about passing on an offer that would have changed the course of hockey history.
“How dumb am I?” laughed Gretzky. “My wife still says to me, ‘You’re really dumb’… Nah, I’m kidding.”
The story is one of the more interesting that hockey’s greatest player has divulged. The thought of Gretzky leaving the 1980s Oilers in favour of the Canucks is almost as wacky as the trade that sent him to the Kings.
There are, however, some wrinkles in the story that don’t quite add up. The biggest is that Sklabania never actually wound up owning the Canucks. Instead, the team was owned by Frank and Arthur Griffiths during that time. It begs the question of how Skalbania was even in the position to propose such an offer to Gretzky in the first place.
Gretzky potentially playing on Canada’s west coast would be visited about a decade later. The Great One was coming off a forgettable tenure with the St. Louis Blues and almost signed with Canucks in the summer of 1996 before eventually heading to the New York Rangers.
The Canucks would later get another dynasty Oilers player a year later with fan-favourite Mark Messier signing with the team in 1997.
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