Mike Celizic

The Great One is making the Great Mistake taking over as coach of the Phoenix Coyotes.

Wayne Gretzky has done very well as the executive director of Canada’s Olympic and world teams, and he may yet prove he can be a top general manager. But if he thinks he can coach in today’s NHL, he’s kidding himself, and the Phoenix ownership group is making a big mistake.

Even with the additions of Brett Hull and Petr Nedved — two former teammates of Gretzky who adored him — this is not a good hockey team. The last time the NHL and its players saw fit to hold a season, the Coyotes finished 13th out of 15 teams in the Western Conference; their 68 points were one fewer than the Rangers, the worst-managed team in sports, managed to collect.

When you have a team that bad, the presence of even the greatest player the game has ever seen on the bench isn’t going to make it better. Even if he could somehow transfer his skills to the Coyotes, it wouldn’t help a great deal. It’s a far different game that the NHL was playing when last it was open for business than the one with which Gretzky was familiar in his prime with the Edmonton Oilers.

FREE VIDEO Great One excited Aug. 9: Hall of Fame player Wayne Gretzky talks about taking the Coyotes' head coaching job.

Gretzky played in hockey’s wide-open era, when skating and actual hockey skills — puck-handling, passing, movement — were valued and rewarded. But as the league expanded past the ability of the limited pool of hockey fans to support it, talent was thinned and spread around. Without the money to assemble teams of superstars, some franchises looked around for other ways to win.

The New Jersey Devils and then-coach Jacques Lemaire, found the secret in what Lemaire always called the kind of hockey played by the dynastic Montreal Canadien teams of the 70s and others called the neutral-zone trap. By any name, it still clogged up the ice and slowed down the game.

An epidemic of clutching and grabbing accompanied the trap, with the result being that goals-per-game dropped precipitously and 50-goal scorers became an endangered species.

The NHL is introducing new rules to open up the game, it's true. It’s a good idea, but no matter what the league does, the zone trap is still going to rule on defense because it’s a good system that works. The league can reduce its effectiveness, but it can’t bring back the 1980s and the Oilers.