Observers chuckled or cringed, and sometimes both.

“He was notorious for walking into the room, he immediately grabs the stick of a new guy, looks at it and goes, ‘Hmmm, now I know why you can’t pass!’” former Blues defenseman Chris Pronger said. “It was always ‘Now I know why’ ... He’d pick you apart in about four seconds.”

Hull’s personality took its toll on a string of head coaches, but one of them, Joel Quenneville, respected him.

“Hullie had a strong opinion, but he backed it up by his performance and his competitiveness,” Quenneville said. “I think he always meant well and told it the way it was. If you know Hullie, that’s the way he is, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Gretzky refers to Hull as an “open book.”

“He’s not going to lie to you, he’s going to tell you what he believes, and in a lot of ways that’s the way it should be,” Gretzky said. “They would line up to hear what he would have to say after a game. He was so blunt and so honest, from a lot of point of views it was refreshing for fans and reporters to hear someone speak exactly what they thought and he did that each and every night.