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Ice hockey, referred to simply as hockey in Canada, the United States, and most of Europe including Finland, Sweden, Russia and the Czech Republic, is a team sport played on ice. It is one of the world's fastest sports, with players on skates capable of going high speeds on natural or artificial ice surfaces. Though played on six continents, ice hockey, as a participatory and as a spectator sport, is most popular in nations in which the climate is sufficiently cold as to permit natural, long-term seasonal ice cover; Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Slovakia, Sweden, Russia, and the United States have dominated international competition, claiming 47 of the 48 gold and silver medals awarded in the men's and women's competitions at the Olympic Winter Games.
Ice hockey is one of the four major North American professional sports, represented at the highest level by the National Hockey League. It is the official national winter sport of Canada, where seven of the 32 NHL franchises are based; Canadian-born players, though, outnumber American-born players in the NHL by a factor of three (30 per cent, additionally, come from outside North America).
The sport is played on a hockey rink. During normal play, there are six players, five positional players and one goaltender, per team on the ice at any time, each of whom is on ice skates. The objective of the game is to score goals by shooting a hard vulcanized rubber disc, the puck, into the opponent's goal net, with the goal nets placed at opposite ends of the rink. The players may control the puck using a long stick with a blade that is commonly curved at one end. Players may also generally redirect the puck with any part of their bodies, but the kicking of the puck into the goal is prohibited.
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The history of the National Hockey League began with the demise of its predecessor league, the National Hockey Association (NHA), in 1917. After unsuccessfully resolving disputes with Eddie Livingstone, owner of the Toronto Blueshirts, executives of the three other NHA franchises suspended the NHA, and formed the National Hockey League (NHL), replacing the Livingstone team with a temporary team in Toronto, the Arenas. The NHL's first quarter-century saw the league compete against two rival major leagues—the Pacific Coast Hockey Association and Western Canada Hockey League—for players and the Stanley Cup. The NHL first expanded into the United States in 1924 with the founding of the Boston Bruins, and by 1926 consisted of ten teams in Ontario, Quebec, the Great Lakes region, and the Northeastern United States. At the same time, the NHL emerged as the only major league and the sole competitor for the Stanley Cup; in 1947, the NHL completed a deal with the Stanley Cup trustees to gain full control of the Cup. The NHL's footprint spread across Canada as Foster Hewitt's radio broadcasts were heard coast-to-coast starting in 1933. (more...)
Quotes
| “ | All hockey players are bilingual. They know English and profanity. | ” |
| — Gordie Howe | ||
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Mario Lemieux was a professional ice hockey player who played 17 seasons for the Pittsburgh Penguins, from 1984 to 2005. He became the principal owner of the Penguins in 1999, after buying the team out of bankruptcy.
Did you know ...
- ...that former Boston Bruins defenceman Zdeno Chára holds the record for the fastest slapshot struck in an All-Star skills competition, having propelled a puck 108.8 miles per hour?
- ...that for scoring a gold medal-winning, shootout goal against Canadian goaltender Corey Hirsch in the 1994 Winter Olympic Games, forward Peter Forsberg was featured on a Swedish postage stamp?
- ...that goaltenders are not sent to the penalty box and have their penalties served by proxy by any other player on the ice at the time of the penalty? (The exception being match penalty, where the goalkeeper actually has to leave the ice.)
- ...that Peter Pocklington, owner of the Edmonton Oilers, had his father's name, Basil, engraved on the Stanley Cup after the Oilers won the 1984 championship? Basil had absolutely nothing to do with the team beyond the family connection. The NHL decreed this to be unacceptable, and had the name X'd out.
- ...that Canada and the Soviet Union were disqualified from the 1987 World Junior Ice Hockey Championships following the Punch-up in Piestany?
