I wasn't there, so I don't know. According to Gretzky in that 99 Stories of the Game book, he was fully ready to sign with Vancouver the next morning, had no other competing offers, and simply got pissed off that Canucks' management insisted he sign that night.
You may be right, but it seems odd that Wayne would go out of his way to make a whole story about this in his own book if he had been secretly leveraging with NYR. As I recall from reading it, he seemed kind of pissed at the Canucks still, years later.
(I don't know what Al Strachan said, so I can't comment on that. Man, I hate Al Strachan.)
If you go back and check the dates, you'll see that Gretzky didn't sign in NYR until July 21, three weeks into the UFA period. Which is very unusual for a top player.
Gretzky *desperately* wanted to go to NY. Bright lights of Broadway, re-unite with Mess, sign with a good team that made the Conference Finals the previous year. Low travel, lots of time with family, potential acting opportunities for his wife. It's pretty easy to see it was a much more attractive situation than a sub-500 Canadian team with terrible travel.
But NYR were in a weird flux cost-cutting period and only showed half-hearted interest (note that this was the only season of the 1990s where the high-spending Rangers signed absolutely nobody on July 1 and went into the 96-97 season with guys like Daniel Goneau and Christian Dube on their roster straight out of junior) while the Canucks went hard for him right from July 1. And the Canucks were getting very frustrated that the negotiation was dragging on for weeks when they appeared to be meeting all of his demands.
And then they got tipped off that he was taking their offers to NYR to try and get them to match, they were furious, gave an ultimatum, and gave Gretzky an opportunity to walk away and sound like the good guy when really he'd been using them.
He might have actually signed with Vancouver if NYR didn't come through ... but it wasn't what he wanted to happen and it would only have been because there weren't any other real options. The notion that he was super happy to sign in Vancouver and they ruined it by phoning him late at night is somewhere between a half-truth and an utter fabrication.
And absolutely he was still pissed years later (as was Canucks management). They basically called him dishonest in his dealings and I'm sure he didn't like that, whether it was right or wrong.
As for why he'd write it that way in his book ... I think pretty every autobiography in history provides a gilded one-sided story to make the protagonist look good. But his story doesn't make sense. If he wanted to sign in Vancouver, why did it take so long? Why would he actually have wanted to sign in Vancouver over NYR? Why would Vancouver have given him an ultimatum like that if negotiations were going well?
Vancouver had let Cliff Ronning walk on July 1 to clear money for Gretzky and then 3 weeks later they found out they were getting played and their C situation was screwed for the upcoming season. They were pissed, with good reason.