Nominal vs present value
Local display: $29.8m · Rebased to 2024 USD via US CPI-U
How the total breaks down
NHL salary. Salary during his Los Angeles Kings/St. Louis Blues transition year, still among the league's highest.
Endorsements & licensing. Titan hockey sticks, Upper Deck trading cards and other deals built on his LA-market visibility since 1988.
Impact 96
- Was hockey's top Forbes-recorded earner throughout the 1990s
- Opened Southern California's endorsement market to a hockey player for the first time
- Made a single skater's off-ice income rival that of NBA and NFL stars
Gretzky's move to Los Angeles in 1988 did for hockey endorsements what his scoring records did for the stat sheet: it proved a hockey player could be a genuine national commercial figure, not just a regional one. Trading-card, equipment and licensing deals built around his LA-market fame kept his earnings at the top of the sport for a decade, a template later stars like Lemieux and Jagr never quite matched.
By 1995, seven years after the trade that sent him from Edmonton to Los Angeles, Gretzky's earning power had barely dimmed even as his scoring pace slowed: Forbes tracked his total at $14.5 million, split between a still-substantial NHL salary and an endorsement and licensing portfolio built on a decade of LA-market visibility no earlier hockey player had ever had access to. It made him, by a wide margin, the sport's best-paid athlete of his generation.