Wayne Gretzky
Canadian ice hockey player and coach (born 1961)
Wayne Douglas Gretzky ( GRET-skee; born January 26, 1961) is a Canadian former professional ice hockey player and head coach. He played 20 seasons in the National Hockey League (NHL) for four teams from 1979 to 1999. Nicknamed "the Great One", he has been called the greatest ice hockey player ever by the NHL based on surveys of hockey writers, ex-players, general managers and coaches. Gretzky is the leading career point scorer and assist producer in NHL history and has more assists than any other player has total career points. He is the only NHL player to total over 200 points in one season, a feat he accomplished four times. In addition, Gretzky scored more than 100 points in 15 professional seasons. At the time of his retirement in 1999, he held 61 NHL records: 40 regular season records, 15 playoff records, and six All-Star records.
Born and raised in Brantford, Ontario, Gretzky honed his skills on a backyard rink and regularly played minor ice hockey at a level far above his peers. Despite his unimpressive size and strength, Gretzky's intelligence, stamina, and reading of the game were unrivaled. He was adept at dodging checks from opposing players, consistently anticipated where the puck was going to be, and executed the right move at the right time.
“Wayne Gretzky” enters the record as canadian ice hockey player and coach (born 1961). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wayne, Gretzky and Canadian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Wayne Gretzky” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Wayne, Gretzky and Canadian provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q209518. VIAF identifies the subject as 3398091. The Library of Congress control number is n82099478. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1961, 1979 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wayne Gretzky” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.