Gretzky's Army to the Rescue

"It was great to see how alive Wayne looked and how enthusiastic he was behind the bench. I could tell he loved coaching.” - Kelly Hrudey, former Gretzky teammate, at GlobeSports.com

Feel better now, Coyotes fans?

Sure, Wayne Gretzky used your team as a personal coaching workshop, with predictable results.

Yes, he gave jobs to unqualified cronies, like former agent Mike Barnett, who sat in the GM's office for six disastrous years (and got a four-year contract extension the year before he was fired).

And his outlandish coaching salary - reported to be $8 million per year - couldn't have helped the financial crisis that brought the Coyotes to bankruptcy.

But hey, he loved every minute of it. Isn't that great?

Hrudey, who played goal when Gretzky was an L.A. King, is a commentator at Hockey Night in Canada, making him one of the most prominent hockey voices in the country.

He's also among the legions jumping to Wayne's defence in the wake of the unceremonious end to the Gretzky era in Phoenix.

The Great One's status in Canada is such that his resignation from the Coyotes made front-page news.

And when was the last time an NHL coach with such a dismal record was so staunchly defended in the media?

Apologists assure us that Gretz learned a lot in his four years as coach - neglecting to mention that the team paid dearly for serving as his on-the-job training site.

They point out that the other boneheads running the Coyotes should have known better than to give him so much control and so much money. As if that makes his track record look any better.

The best you can say for the Gretzky era is that it left the Coyotes with a core of young players who might one day lead the team to respectability. That's almost inevitable when you draft as high as Phoenix does every year.

Not everyone treats Wayne Gretzky as a teflon man.

Another article at GlobeSports.com suggests he had no qualms about playing hardball with the Coyotes, even when it was to the detriment of the franchise.

And according to Helene Elliot at the L.A. Times, this isn't the first time Gretzky has left a team under a cloud. Or the first time his hand-picked general manager left a team in a shambles.

None of this diminishes Gretzky's near-miraculous achievements as a player.

But beyond the legal horror show that ended his tenure in Phoenix, there can be little doubt that hockey's greatest star is a dismal failure as coach and director of hockey operations.

No matter how hard his entourage spins the evidence.

(Photo: Streeter Lecka/Getty Images )