Mikael Lindholm arrived with the Los Angeles Kings in 1989 as a 12th-round draft pick nobody expected much from, and was promptly handed a spot alongside Wayne Gretzky and Mike Krushelnyski for his first ten NHL games. In the opening one, he collected the puck behind the opposition net.
What happened next taught him something about where he was allowed to stand.
“I remember in the first game I got the puck behind the net. Gretzky was standing down in the corner watching. It wasn’t as if he was making himself available,” Lindholm told Swedish hockeysverige.se. “I was thinking, why isn’t he doing anything? I tried to do something with it, which probably didn’t come off well.”
The explanation arrived when he got back to the bench, delivered in English by a teammate who had seen this before.
“Mikael, this is not your office. That’s Gretz,” Krushelnyski told him.
Lindholm has since worked out the other half of it.
“Gretzky was probably wondering what idiot was standing there in his spot,” he said, laughing.
What was Wayne Gretzky like as a teammate?
The schedule around him was not like anyone else’s. If the team met at eleven for practice, Gretzky arrived at half past ten to get through the interviews first. On the road, where things were quieter, he hosted dinners and behaved like any other player in the group.
“He was a little shy, but always very pleasant,” Lindholm said.
READ MORE: Brett Hull warned Wayne Gretzky not to join his team
That season also taught the Swede what NHL specialization actually looked like. He watched John Tonelli stay out after every practice taking the same shot into the far corner, and didn’t understand the point of it until Tonelli scored 10 or 15 goals from that exact spot on the power play.
He had similar thoughts about Luc Robitaille, whose skating he initially found unimpressive. Robitaille scored 52 goals that year.
Lindholm’s NHL career ended at 18 games, two goals and four points. The surname went considerably further. His son Elias Lindholm went fifth overall to Carolina in 2013, and Calle Jarnkrok is his nephew.
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