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Gretzky: 'I don't know if a guy like Paul Coffey or myself could play in this era'

Gretzky: 'I don't know if a guy like Paul Coffey or myself could play in this era'

Today's NHL is bigger and faster than the league he dominated a generation ago, but it's also more systems-oriented, even "robotic," says Wayne Gretzky, and he has doubts if the trailblazing and creative approach he and his fellow Edmonton Oilers of the 1980s employed would fit in to this era.

In an interview Tuesday night with Peter Mansbridge for CBC's 'The National' on the eve of another NHL season, Gretzky noted that while "the game's better because the players are better," the way hockey is being coached leaves little room for imagination.

"It's very much more robotic because it's more systematic now," he said. "There's too much at stake, not only for obviously the NHL teams, but junior teams, college teams. If you go to a peewee hockey game here in Toronto probably these coaches are systematic now – you play left wing, you play your position. You play right wing, you play your position.

"I don't know if a guy like Paul Coffey or myself, we could play in this era because our creativity would've just naturally taken over and now the game is so systematic."

He's made this point before. And even one example that appears on the surface a repudiation of the argument – Team North America at last month's World Cup of Hockey, where Pavel Datsyuk expressed similar sentiments to Gretzky's – is actually anything but. That one-off team of under 24-year-olds featured some of the game's brightest young stars, hailed as the most creative team of the bunch, and even compared to Gretzky's dynastic Oilers for their swashbuckling ways. Yet their coach Todd McLellan noted that they were also playing according to the exact same template, the very system that McLellan uses in his day job as coach of the NHL Oilers.

"It's almost impossible to do on a yearly basis for 82 games what we've done here in a short-term tournament," McLellan assessed at the end of that tournament. To which Gretzky, Datsyuk and the rest might say: exactly.

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