Before I go into details about why this connection between Wayne Gretzky and the NHL gambling scandal has made me question everything I thought I knew about sports, a quick note: the NBA All-Star Game reserves will be announced in early evening. Local fans, don't hold your breath on Carmelo Anthony. A Denver TV station reported last night that he's going to be the odd man out on the West team. That's a real shame, with the season he's having. It's by far his best season, the Nuggets are leading their division, he'll never deserve it more than he does this year, and he apparently won't be there in Houston. That makes him 0-for-3. Meanwhile, if someone recalls the last Baltimore native to make the All-Star Game before Sam Cassell made it in 2004, feel free to pass it along.

Meanwhile, published reports say that the Wizards' Gilbert Arenas, having a better season than last year when he made the team, and now the No. 4 scorer in the NBA, didn't make it either.

Back to The Great One.

The one and only reason I am into the NHL as much as I am today is because of watching Gretzky back in the Edmonton days. Forget the L.A. days with the black jerseys, giving the sport its best and most widespread footing ever in this country. If you got to see him in the late '70s and early '80s when the Oilers were the dynasty, when you could barely get the games except in the playoffs, when he was with Messier and Kurri and McSorley and McTavish and Grant Fuhr (a black man in goal winning Stanley Cups back in the 1980s - whoa), you had to get hooked. The same way people can't get with the NBA now because Magic, Larry and Michael are gone, who can really watch it today without comparing it to the days of Gretzky? You can't. Don't try. Don't even fake like you're trying.

So it's a lot harder to crack on the scuzzy developments in this story - all the Rick Tocchet stuff, the Mob ties, the wife, even the big poster New Jersey crime official made up to illustrate their investigation. (If you've caught a glimpse on the news, you know what it is - a giant flow chart, straight out of the Sopranos with the bosses at the top and their underlings below, with drawings of hockey players blasting a puck. Operation Slap Shot, get it?) Because Gretzky's not an innocent bystander in this car wreck for the league anymore. He's in it way deeper. Not deep like Tocchet, but anyone who has watched Goodfellas or Donnie Brasco or any other of the Mob Pantheon movies, once your name and voice come up on a wiretap, it's hard to talk your way out of it or to hide behind your legend rep.

Is it cheesy to say, "Say it ain't so, Great One"? Sorry, can't help it.