The Great Gretzky. Wayne Gretzky, a retired professional hockey player, played 20 seasons in the National Hockey League (NHL), from 1980 through 1999. S. Berry explored some of Gretzky’s accomplishments in “A Statistician Reads the Sports Pages” (Chance, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 49–54). The following table shows the number of games in which Gretzky played during each of his 20 seasons in the NHL.