A few years ago, former NHL winger Greg Adams arrived at a hotel in downtown Vancouver, where he and his wife, Stacy, were attending a charity event honoring a fellow ex-Canucks player. While Greg checked in and got settled, Stacy went for a walk. Upon returning, she stopped by the front desk, gave Greg’s name, and received her own room key.
What happened next sounds like something out of a 1980s sitcom, which is fitting: Near the end of the 1988-89 NHL season, two Canucks players entered the record books as the NHL’s first pair of teammates with the same name.
Decades later, it led to things going sideways at the hotel.
“They gave her the key to his room,” Stacy’s husband said, referring to the other former NHL winger named Greg Adams. “Look, I was in our room; I didn’t see what happened. But security was called because I think Greg’s wife thought a woman was trying to get into their room.”
The Greg Adamses are no longer alone these days. When the Canucks opened the 2025-26 season on Thursday night against the Calgary Flames, their lineup featured 26-year-old Elias Pettersson at center and 21-year-old Elias Pettersson on defense — the second set of mutual-namesake teammates in league history, coincidentally in the same city where Greg Adams and Greg Adams once shared a dressing room.
Although they are both Swedish, the Elias Petterssons can at least be distinguished by position and pronunciation: uh-LEE-uhs peh-TUHR-suhn for the forward; uh-LIGH-uhs PEH-tuhr-suhn for the blueliner. Their predecessors with the Canucks enjoyed neither luxury. It probably didn’t help that each Greg Adams hailed from British Columbia, weighed between 190 and 195 pounds during his playing career, suited up for at least five NHL teams and shot pucks left-handed.
Still, if anyone knows how Pettersson and Pettersson are feeling — and, for that matter, the confusion their Vancouver teammates are likely experiencing — it is Adams and Adams.
“The one thing I would tell them is to have fun with it,” said Greg Adams, the one married to Stacy. “Not like we did, but in their own way. Just have fun with it when people bring up the names thing — it’s a fun little club.”
Greg “Eddie” Adams, left, made NHL history in Vancouver with Greg “Gus” Adams during the 1988-89 season. (Bernstein Associates, Graig Abel / Getty Images)
Luckily, even before they were teammates, the NHL’s Greg Adamses earned nicknames that would eventually help tell them apart. Born in 1960, the elder Adams — the one whose wife, Judy, received the surprise visitor to her hotel room — stood out at the rink because of his fondness for stretching on the bench between shifts.
During one game in the early 1980s, then-Flyers teammate Reggie Leach, a holdover from the “Broad Street Bullies” era of the previous decade, took a playful swipe at Adams, then touted as part of the team’s next generation.
“Reggie saw me stretching and shouted, ‘Who the f— are you, Ed Allen?’” Greg Adams said, referring to the late host of syndicated exercise programming.
“That was it. ‘Eddie’ just kind of followed me.”
Born in 1963, the younger Greg Adams became known as “Gus” to teammates during his eight seasons in Vancouver, arriving in a trade from the Devils on the eve of the 1987-88 season. The nickname was the first name of his grandfather, and it stuck when Canucks play-by-play broadcaster Jim Robson started referring to Adams as “Gus” on the air.
“My first name kind of disappeared after that,” he said.
At the time, Gus Adams had no inkling that the new label would eventually prove fortunate. But he learned as much in March 1989, when his Canucks made a trade with the Edmonton Oilers to bring Eddie Adams to Vancouver.
Until then, Gus’s knowledge of hockey’s other Greg Adams was limited to the “four or five phone calls” that his father had received when Eddie debuted in the NHL with the Flyers on Jan. 17, 1981 — three days short of four years before Gus followed suit for the New Jersey Devils.
“He had to keep saying, ‘No, that’s not my son,’” Gus Adams said. “So I always knew of him because of that. But we really didn’t meet until we were in Vancouver.”
At the time of Eddie’s acquisition, Gus was sidelined by an injury. Before one on-ice session, as he worked towards returning to game action, Gus tried on a new pair of skates. But the boots were at least a size too small for his feet. He worried the manufacturer had somehow lost his measurements.
“They were Greg’s skates, not mine,” Gus Adams said. “What are you going to do? When people send things, they just address them to “Greg Adams.”
The same went for fan mail.
“I opened a lot of letters that were for Gus,” Eddie Adams said, laughing. “I should have known they weren’t for me, but it felt good to get a big pile of mail from fans.”
Greg “Eddie” Adams, Stacy Adams and Greg “Gus” Adams at a restaurant in Kelowna, B.C. (Courtesy of Stacy Adams)
Playing the same positions at left wing, the Greg Adamses stood apart on the ice by their numbers: Gus wore No. 8, Eddie took No. 22. But mostly it was their nicknames that made life easier on teammates and coaches for the nine games that the duo logged together — two at the end of the regular season, and the entirety of a seven-game series loss to eventual-champion Calgary in the opening round of the 1989 Stanley Cup playoffs.
Canucks coach Bob McCammon certainly had some fun with the unique situation, deploying Gus and Eddie on the same line for their first game as teammates.
“I think he wanted to make it harder on the announcers,” Gus Adams said.
The two Gregs enjoyed it, too. Eddie’s brashness contrasted with Gus’s more reserved nature, but their differences amused one another. Eddie fondly recalled the first joint interview with him and Gus, when a reporter asked if they had the same parents.
Said Eddie, “I was a bit of a smartass and toward the end of my career and I didn’t have tolerance for dumb questions. So when the guy asked if we had the same parents, I said, ‘Yeah, and that makes our parents the stupidest people in the world.’
“And everybody had a good laugh, although I don’t think the reporter wrote a lot of good stories about me after that.”
Though they spent more time as opponents than as teammates over their hockey careers, the Greg Adamses became fast friends on the Canucks. Eddie played just one more NHL season, finishing with 227 points in 544 games for seven teams. Gus, meanwhile, went on to amass 743 points over 1,056 games for five teams, highlighted by an appearance in the 1988 All-Star Game during his first year in Vancouver and an iconic series-clinching overtime goal for the Canucks in the 1994 conference finals.
The former teammates still speak every few months, catching up in person when Greg and Stacy Adams return to the Vancouver area, where Greg and Judy Adams retain a residence. The latter couple also enjoys frequenting wineries in Kelowna, British Columbia, where the former owns a summer residence.
One recent day, Eddie and Judy were walking through a mall when she called out his real first name.
“She was a few feet away, whatever — and she goes, ‘Greg!’” Eddie Adams said. “I looked, and Greg Adams was there. My god! We kind of looked at each other and started laughing, because we didn’t know the other Greg was there.”
If history repeats itself in Vancouver, the shared experience of the Elias Petterssons will lead to a friendship between the center and the defenseman that lasts beyond their days playing together. That’s how it worked out for the Greg Adamses, who are satisfied with their niche, name-related place in NHL history — even if another tandem has since joined them in the club.
“It’s a minor footnote in hockey, a curiosity of some people,” Eddie Adams said. “But, basically, a lot of people in this world have the same name. We just happened to end up with the same name and end up on the same hockey team for about a month.”
