BASSIN WILL ALWAYS BE ‘THE GUY WHO PASSED ON GRETZKY’
Great One had one chance to be a No. 1 pick, but GM didn’t do it and still has no regrets
Every once in a while, Sherry Bassin will be in a mall or a hockey arena or a restaurant and somebody will point at him and say: “You know who that is? That’s the guy who passed on Wayne Gretzky.”
And Bassin, who all but invented the long conversation, will turn his head the other way and say nothing.
The truth: With the first pick in the only draft of Gretzky’s hockey life, the Oshawa Generals did not select the soon to be Great One. Bassin, who had been a junior GM for about five minutes at the time, made a decision he thought long about and really has never second guessed for an entire career in hockey.
“I was driving down the 401 and I’m at Kennedy heading toward Oshawa,” said Bassin. “And on the radio Wayne Gretzky is having a news conference, and he says he’s going to play one year of junior and then go to the WHA. I was so stunned I almost drove into the concrete barrier. I was just happy I kept the car on the road. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”
He drove straight to his office, shut the door, sat for a while working everything out in his mind. The Generals had first pick in the OHL draft of 1977. His first phone call after hearing the news conference was to his team’s owner, John Humphries, and Bassin asked a troubling question: “How would you feel if we don’t draft Gretzky?”
He was expecting dial tone. Or screaming. Or something else. When he hired Bassin as GM after coaching one of the worst junior teams in history, he asked Bassin, “what do you want from me?”
Bassin replied: “You be the best owner you can be, I’ll be the best general manager I can be. If you want to manage, don’t hire me.”
So when Humphries was asked about the Generals passing on Gretzky, he told Bassin: “You’re the hockey guy.”
Gretzky has won four Stanley Cups, 10 scoring titles, nine Hart Trophies and was never drafted first in his life. He wasn’t drafted into the NHL at all. He was part of the negotiations of the WHA merger. And when he could have gone first in a draft, the Generals stunningly passed and selected Tom Mccarthy instead.
“You should have seen the papers,” Bassin said. “You should have heard the radio shows in Oshawa. Back then, not like today, we had a lot of media covering us. The Oshawa Times did an editorial on the new GM who had denied the community the ability to see the next great superstar. My wife, Jean, was worried about how the kids were going to get treated at school. It was a different time.”
The Generals opened their season against Gretzky and the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds. They lost 6-1. Gretzky scored three goals and had three assists. After the game, Bassin was asked to appear on Oshawa radio with the playby-play crew.
“The first question was, ‘What did you think of Gretzky’s game?’
“I said, ‘I’d have really been impressed if he had seven points.’
“The announcer didn’t really get what I was saying. He said, ‘But they only had six goals.’
“Needless to say, I didn’t read the newspapers the next day.”
About a week later, the Generals were playing Gretzky and the Greyhounds in Oshawa for the first time. The place was packed.
“We’re ahead 4-3 late in the game and Mccarthy has a hat trick for us. Everything was going our way, and there’s Gretzky, in his office behind the net, setting up the tying goal. There was no overtime in those days.
“When the goal was scored, I think the rink held about 4,000 people, I think 3,900 of them turned around and pointed at me. That was the start of my career as a manager. I thought, this is going to haunt me forever.”
Gretzky played his one season in the Ontario Hockey League, and at the age of 16 he scored 182 points in 64 games. Mccarthy wasn’t a bad choice either for the Generals. He played two seasons in Oshawa, scoring 237 points before being drafted in the first round by the Minnesota North Stars.
“We were trying to build a team for that year and the future,” Bassin said. “If Gretzky was only going to stay one year, I don’t think we had any choice. We had to do what we did even though it sounded so bad at the time and people didn’t understand.”
Bassin went on to build championship teams in Oshawa, the Soo and Erie, went to numerous Memorial Cups, and was part of the first Canadian junior team to win gold in Europe. A hockey career and then some.
“There’s a part of me that wishes I took Gretzky,” the 80-yearold said. “I would have enjoyed developing a relationship with the Gretzkys and with Wayne. Think about it, I would have started my career with Wayne Gretzky and ended it with Connor Mcdavid. That would have been two pretty good bookends, wouldn’t it?”
We were trying to build a team for that year and the future ... If Gretzky was only going to stay one year, I don’t think we had any choice.