Gretzky was easily in the top 10-15 of fastest skaters in the 80's. IMO Bob Bourne was the fastest and Paul Coffey was the best all around skater. Gretzky was no slouch and if you compare him to his contempoaries of the era he had above average speed. His outstanding lateral movement and shiftiness combined with his vision and quickness far outweighed his speed so people forget how fast he was.
Whoa! Gretzky wasn't even one of the 10 or 15 fastest skaters on his
team, much less in his decade! In fact, one season, in training camp, he actually finished dead last among Edmonton skaters in the speed drill. He was a notoriously slow skater, and he was always the first to admit it.
What made him
seem like a fast skater was that he was a much faster
thinker than anyone else in the game, or for that matter in the history of the game. Zine summed it up perfectly -
Zine said:
A good 'slippery' skater but certainly nothing special.
Gretz was always so ridiculously ahead of the play mentally, it made his skating seem better than it was. Pretty hard to catch a guy if he knows what your gonna do even before you do.
What made Gretz seem so fast is that he always knew where the opening was going to be before the opening even knew it, and he steamed toward it as fast as he could go. He always knew exactly where the play was going, and he was at his top speed before the other, faster skaters even knew which way to turn. That's the main reason why it looked like he was smoking everybody. If he'd really been one of the 10 or 15 fastest skaters in the league, to go along with his other skills, the league would have had to institute a "Gretzky Rule", in which any time a team got up by more than 25 goals on another team, any player wearing the number "99" on his back would have to sit out the rest of the game.
He was allways rated fairly high on the speed attribute on EA's first NHL games.
