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Twenty years after the greatest night in the greatest season by hockey's greatest scorer, Wayne Gretzky still remembers the goals that got away.
“I had eight or nine good chances. Their goalie made some terrific saves,” The Great One says about Dec. 30, 1982. What he doesn't mention is that he had a pretty terrific night, too, scoring five times to shatter one of the NHL's most hallowed standards – 50 goals in 50 games, a mark set by Maurice “The Rocket” Richard in 1944-45 and not equaled until 1981-82, when the New York Islanders' Mike Bossy did it.

The five-goal night gave Gretzky 50 in just 39 games on the way to a record-setting 92-goal season. Neither mark has been seriously threatened in the two decades since.

Gretzky entered his third NHL season with two Hart Trophies as the league's MVP and one Art Ross Trophy as the 1980-81 scoring leader, having led the Edmonton Oilers to their first playoff berth the previous spring. Though he'd scored 51 and 55 goals in his first two seasons, the consensus among his rivals was that defenders were better off making Gretzky shoot, because his passing skills were so deadly.

Gretzky realized that defenses were playing off him, and he made the most of the opportunity.

“I don't think anyone had to tell him to shoot more,” says Kevin Lowe, then Gretzky's teammate with Edmonton and now the Oilers' general manager. “I think that teams may have started to pay more attention to covering his wings and left him alone. And one thing about Wayne: He always made the right play.”

Gretzky came out firing – after taking 269 and 261 shots in his first two seasons, he led the NHL with 369 in 81-82. It took No. 99 three games to get No. 1, the tie-breaking goal in a 7-4 victory over the Kings. But once he found the range, he never lost it. On Halloween, in the Oilers' 13th game, Gretzky connected for four goals in an 11-4 rout of Quebec—the first of 10 hat tricks he recorded that season. “It started a snowball effect,” says Gretzky, who despite was still setting up goals at a record pace.

The snowball kept rolling: He had two goals in the next game against Toronto and never dipped below a goal-a-game pace again.

“Around the 25th game (actually Game 24 against Los Angeles on Nov. 25), I had another four-goal game. That gave me 28 and it's when I knew I could get 50 in 50 games – that was the benchmark set by Rocket Richard and Mike Bossy.”

The word was out: Lay off Gretzky and he'll kill you.

“He started to recognize the fear that goaltenders had of him,” Lowe says. “Not the same kind of fear that Bobby Hull generated – this was more like ‘What's he going to do with the puck.' And Wayne didn't waste shots. He had a deceivingly hard shot, a good backhand, and could shoot a change-up.”

Gretzky reached the 40-goal mark in Game 36 against Calgary, got No. 41 in the next game against Vancouver, and connected for a second four-goal game against Los Angeles on Dec. 27, giving him 45 in 38 games.

“I thought to myself, ‘you can't choke now,'” he says of his pursuit of the legendary 50-in-50 mark.

Not only did Gretzky not choke, he obliterated one of hockey's most famous marks, scoring five times against Philadelphia on Dec. 30 to give him 50 goals in 39 games – a mark that has stood untouched for two decades.


Two decades after he put up more goals than anyone in NHL history, The Great One has one regret: that he didn't score more.
He knew right away that this game would be special.

“Charlie Huddy took a shot from the left point that bounced off the boards and right to me at the corner of the net, and I put it in,” Gretzky says of his first goal that night. “I thought to myself, ‘how fortunate.'” I got the 47th, the 48th, and the 49th, but it was ironic – I had eight or nine point-blank chances and [Flyers goaltender] Pete Peeters made some great saves.“

Peeters wasn't around for the historic tally. With the Flyers trailing 6-5, he was on the bench when Glenn Anderson got control of the puck in the final minute and skimmed it up the middle. Gretzky grabbed the puck, raced down ice, and dunked it into the empty net for No. 50. The Northlands Coliseum erupted as his teammates mobbed him.

”Bill Barber [then a Flyers forward] said that if I were going in alone on an empty net for the 50th goal, he'd throw his stick [giving him an automatic goal],“ Gretzky remembers. ”That would have made a great trivia question – how I scored my 50th goal without putting the puck into the net.“

Ironically, one night after torturing one of the NHL's best defenses, Gretzky was blanked against one the worst – he went scoreless in Edmonton's 3-1 loss to Vancouver. But it took Gretzky only 24 more games to shatter Phil Esposito's single-season mark of 76 goals. The record-setter came on Feb. 24 in Buffalo, when Gretzky fired a wrist shot past Don Edwards with 6:36 remaining for goal No. 77. For good measure, he added Nos. 78 and 79 in the final two minutes – and 13 more goals in the Oilers' final 16 games, meaning that not only had he beaten Esposito's record, he'd obliterated it. He did the same thing with Espo's mark of 152 points, finishing with 212, including the 92 goals.

Not bad for a skinny 21-year-old who could have passed for a stickboy. But in Gretzky's case, appearances were deceiving.

”What separated Wayne from everyone else was his passion for the game,“ Lowe says. ”All stars have a love for the game. What separates players like Wayne is the passion – he's like Michael Jordan. They take it to the next level.“

Dave Taylor, then an All-Star with Los Angeles, later a teammate of Gretzky's in LA, and now the Kings' general manager, agrees with Lowe that Gretzky was never satisfied.

”I never saw a player with that kind of killer instinct,“ Taylor says. ”If it was 4-1, he wanted to make it 5-1. If it was 6-1, he wanted to make it 7-1. He never let up. He always had that drive to score another goal.“

And two decades after he put up more goals than anyone in NHL history, The Great One has one regret: that he didn't score more.

”It was a thrill to get 92 goals, but in some ways, I thought I let myself down by not getting 100,“ says Gretzky, whose challenges today include running the Phoenix Coyotes and managing the Canadian Olympic Team. ”Maybe I should have pushed myself more.“

In the 20 years since Gretzky made hockey history, only two other players, Brett Hull (86 in 1990-91) and Mario Lemieux (85 in 1988-89) have come within hailing distance of Gretzky's mark. No one has broken 70 goals in a season since 1992-93, when Alexander Mogilny and Teemu Selanne each had 76. With today's defense-first philosophy, no one has managed as many as 60 goals in the past five seasons – Florida's Pavel Bure won the Rocket Richard Trophy, given to the top goal-scorer, in each of its first two seasons with 58 and 59 goals.

So is Gretzky's record safe for a while?


To Gretzky, the biggest difference today is the caliber of the goalies shooters face night in and night out.
”The way things are now, it's tough enough to score 50 goals in a season, let alone 90,“ Lowe says. ”But things run in cycles. Trends change: Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the game was defense-first and we evolved into a more offensive game. Today, it's back to defense first. I don't think anyone can do it. But you have to expect the unexpected.“

To Gretzky, the biggest difference today is the caliber of the goalies shooters face night in and night out.

”Goaltending is unquestionably better now,“ he says when asked to compare it with 20 years ago. ”If there were 21 teams then, there were probably about six top-flight goaltenders. Today, even though there are 30 teams, everyone has a solid goaltender.

“Goalies today are more athletic. The equipment is better today – the pads are lighter and the protective masks are better, too. Back then, the great goaltenders – guys like Ken Dryden, Bernie Parent, Billy Smith, and Grant Fuhr – were athletes. The rest were just goaltenders. Now, they're all athletes.”

Though Bure is nowhere near the playmaker Gretzky was, Duane Sutter, the Russian Rocket's former coach with the Florida Panthers, does see some similarities between them.

“Pavel shoots a lot more,” says Sutter, who won four Cups with the Islanders. “But one thing they have in common is that they both find ways to get into the open and get their shots off – from any position and off either foot. They also have very good accuracy.”

As great a scorer as Bure is, he has yet to come near Gretzky's record. Nor have Jaromir Jagr, Joe Sakic, or Paul Kariya. Given today's style of play and improved goaltending, the magnitude of Gretzky's accomplishment will only grow over time, as will the difficulty of breaking his mark.

“Time allows greatness to be more appreciated,” says Lowe.

“That season is something that will always be special,” Sutter says. “He'll always be the best.”


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