Gretzky caused NHL expansion?

Many have said that Gretzky's trade to southern California brought hockey to the Sun Belt. Scott Burnside and Wes Goldstein, two hockey journalists, recently reiterated that point. It's something I've always thought was wrong, and nothing they wrote changed my mind.

Burnside: What about franchises that sprouted in unlikely locales like Anaheim, Phoenix, Nashville, Tampa and Atlanta?
No one knows, of course, but the safe answer would be -- not bloody likely

Atlanta had a team years before Gretzky was even a professional hockey player. Atlanta embraced the Flames, and later the IHL Knights, which won a championship there. The Flames failed because the owner failed. It had nothing to do at all with the box office draw. The Knights left because Ted Turner was going to bring an NHL team, later named the Thrashers, to Atlanta.

Goldstein's article is better in my opinion, but it's still littered with illogical conclusions.

"For sure, him coming here was the best thing that could happen to hockey," said former teammate and current Kings executive Luc Robitaille. "When you do well in Los Angeles, everybody knows and starts watching."

Yet I'm supposed to believe other large markets like New York, Chicago and Philadelphia don't mean anything? It may have been the best thing for southern California hockey, but not the rest of the United States.

In the meantime, seeing the Kings succeed in a non-traditional market encouraged the NHL to try for the same results in places like San Jose, Anaheim, Tampa Bay and Miami. That early 1990s expansion set the stage for handing out even more franchises through the remainder of the decade, a period when the NHL began dotting the South and Southwest. The NHL ended up growing to 30 teams during that rush, 24 in the U.S., a strategy that was intended to get the league a much-coveted national network television contract.

There were only two places to expand to at that time - south and west - and both are non-traditional. That Gretzky landed in Los Angeles, a Sun Belt market, is a coincidence.

As another fan said, hockey was a fad in Los Angeles. The NHL would've expanded regardless of Gretzky's brief influence in the southern California market.