Honoured numbers For special successes, the number of the hockey player can be fixed for him forever and no one else in the team will play this number.
The exceptions are special cases, for example, it was allowed Bred Hall to play under the number of his famous brother Bobby Hall, was allowed to use the number of Vladislav Tretiak in CSKA to his grandson, also the goalkeeper.
The number 1 was assigned to the fans of the club in Minnesota Wild.
Well, absolutely non-ordinal case - number 99 is permanently assigned to Wayne Gretzky in the entire NHL.