Gretzky Was Not a Unicorn; And Why That Matters
We love the story and the myth. Wayne Gretzky didn’t just play hockey—he saw the future. He went to where the puck was going to be. He made the impossible look obvious. And because it looked so different from everyone else, we wrapped it in mystique. He became the unicorn. Unique. Unrepeatable. Basically magic.
I've come to believe that story about Gretzky is wrong, and it has slowed hockey's evolution.
If we decide that what Gretzky did was essentially so unique that it’s unteachable, we stop looking for the actual skills underneath the highlight-reel plays. We stop asking what he was seeing, how early he was recognizing patterns, and how he positioned himself and the puck to make teammates better. We turn a remarkable set of perceptual and decision-making abilities into a dead end.
In essence, you can’t develop magic. You can only hope another unicorn shows up.
But what if we flipped the assumption? What if the core of Gretzky’s game — the scanning, the anticipation, the ability to create advantages for other people — isn’t a mystical gift? What if it’s a highly refined version of skills that exist on a continuum? Some players see the ice better than others. Some process information faster. Some are better at predicting what two or three players will do next.
Those differences are real. They are also, at least in part, trainable.
Related: The Maple Leafs Are Betting on More Than Bobrovsky’s Skill
How do we coach what Gretzky was able to do almost instinctively?
This is where modern coaching and skill acquisition start to matter. Concepts like positionless hockey (the kind Finnish coach Jussi Ahokas talks about) try to create environments where players have to solve problems together in real time instead of running fixed routes. In those settings, the value of a player who can read, adapt, and elevate the people around him goes up. The system itself starts to reward the very things Gretzky did at an elite level.
The same shift changes how we evaluate and utilize players. Instead of asking only “Who is the most talented individual player?”, we start asking “Who most consistently makes the players around him better?” That second question is about collaborative efficacy — the idea that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. [If you are interested in that concept, you can read about it here.]
Gretzky was the most collaborative player I’ve seen play.
Gretzky was a master at collaborative efficacy. He didn’t just produce points; he raised the performance of whoever shared the ice with him. None of this requires us to pretend that every player can become Gretzky. They can’t. Elite pattern recognition and processing speed still sit on a distribution, and the far right tail is rare.
But rarity is not the same as mystery. Once we stop calling it magic, we can study it, break it into teachable pieces, and give more players better tools for reading the game. That, I think, is what Jussi Ahokas is talking about bringing to his coaching. And that’s what I think is the evolution of the game.
NHL hockey is great at teaching structured systems, but what if we spent more time developing intelligence?
Hockey has gotten very good at teaching skating, shooting, and structured systems. It has been slower to treat game intelligence as something that can be deliberately developed. The unicorn story is part of the reason. As long as we protect the mystique, we limit how far we push the craft.
Gretzky was extraordinary. He was not unexplainable. And the moment we treat his way of seeing the ice as something we can at least partially understand and coach, player development gets more interesting.
The question stops being whether another unicorn will appear. It becomes how many players we can help see the game a little more like he did.