Yes. Wayne Gretzky is among a long list of NHL players that honed their handeye coordination and physical endurance by playing lacrosse in the summer.
Other players include: Brendan Shanahan, Doug Gilmour, Cliff Ronning, Joe Sakic, Steve Larmer, Collin Patterson, Tim Hunter, Paul Kariya, Don Cherry, Gary Roberts, Adam Oates, Paul Coffey, Joe Nieuwendyk. …and many more!
"If sport has a high point of the year, it must be the first week of spring." "...When I was growing up, I used to love this time of year. It was when I put my hockey equipment away and I was absolutely ecstatic to see the end of the hockey season. One of the worst things to happen to the game, in my opinion, has been year-round hockey and, in particular, summer hockey. "All it does for kids, as far as I can tell, is keep them out of sports they should be doing in warmer weather. I could hardly wait to get my lacrosse stick out and start throwing the ball around. It didn't matter how cold or rainy it would be, we'd be out firing the ball against walls and working on our moves as we played the lacrosse equivalent to road hockey." "All the good hockey players seemed to play lacrosse in those days and everyone of them learned something from the game to carry over to the other - things athletes can only learn by mixing up games they play when they are young."
Wayne Gretsky,
National Post, March, 2000
At age 10, after scoring 196 goals in his hockey league, he scored 158 goals in lacrosse.
According to Wayne, lacrosse was where he learned to protect himself from hard body checking:
"In those days you could be hit from behind in lacrosse, as well as cross-checked,
so you had to learn how to roll body checks for self-protection.
"Wayne applied this skill to the NHL, avoiding checks to the point that it was claimed that
there was an unwritten rule not to hit Gretzky. Gretzky insisted that the skill was
necessary for self-defense as he only weighed 170 pounds.