If you call yourself a hockey fan, or plan on calling yourself a hockey fan, then you’d better know the following ten facts about the National Hockey League.

1. The Basics
   Two teams, six on six, attempt to score on one another while skating on ice.  They hit a rubber puck around using their hockey sticks in an attempt to score on the opposing team’s net.  If you don’ t know this much, then you don’t know what hockey is.
2. The History
   Most believe that the indigenous people of Canada created a version of the game centuries ago, using crude wooden hockey sticks.  British soldiers picked it up in the 1840s and introduced a few rules to it.   In 1910 the sport was popular enough to warrant the founding of the National Hockey Association.  They became known as the National Hockey League in 1917.
3. U.S.A. vs. U.S.S.R.
   At the height of the cold war, these two nations met in the semi-final at the 1980 Winter Olympics.  Now known as the miracle on ice, this game was a classic example of David vs. Goliath.  In this rare instance, the U.S. was David.  Nobody loves rooting for the underdog (or against the Russians) more than the Americans, making this game an instant classic.  David beat Goliath, by the way, but if you’re a hockey fan, then you knew that already.  (Thank you Don for the correction)
4. The Hanson Brothers
   These three childish goons, who acted as violent enforcers on their team, will always be known as three of the most memorable figures in hockey history.  By the way, these guys aren’t real.  They are characters in the greatest hockey movie ever, “Slapshot”, which also happens to be one of the greatest sports movies ever.
5. There’s Fighting Allowed
   Hockey has a few rules about rough play, such as not allowing players to hook others with their hockey sticks. They even have a penalty box where players are sent for disobeying the rules.  Except unlike most sports, hockey encourages fighting.  If players have beef with each other, they can settle it with fisticuffs.
6. The Power Play
   When a player is penalized he must leave the game for two minutes as punishment, leaving his team a man short.  This results in the opposing team trying to take advantage with a power play, which tends to be an offensive onslaught on the other team.
7. The Greatest Player Ever
   Known as the ‘Great One’, Wayne Gretzky is often called the Michael Jordan of Hockey.  Not true.  Jordan was the Gretzky of basketball.  Gretzky scored 1,062 goals in his professional career, won three gold medals with Canada, won four Stanley Cups as well as 9 Hart Trophies (the NHL version of the MVP), 8 of which he won in consecutive years.
8. Most Dominant Franchise Ever
   The Montreal Canadiens have won 23 titles. The Toronto Maple Leafs come in a distant second with 13 titles.  Those Canadians sure know how to play.
9. The Fiercest Rivalry
   Boston Bruins vs. Montreal Canadiens. These two teams have played one another more than any other two in the history of the NHL, including a mind blowing 32 playoff series, of which the Canadiens have won 24.
10. Who Won the 2012 Stanley Cup?
    The Los Angles Kings were the 2012 Stanley Cup champions.  What makes them so special?  The fact that they barely got into the playoffs at an 8 seed, then proceeded to wreck havoc on their way to their first title.

If you call yourself a hockey fan, then you better know these ten things about the NHL.

~ Baruh from CA

People often inquire about Hockey history, but not often do people learn about the history of the pieces that make a sport what it is. Most of you know who invented hockey, or even where it was originated, but do you ever stop and think about the puck?

The history of the word puck can be traced back to pouke in the 1300’s with the Old English meaning of the word devil and later the verb to poke. In Shakespeare’s Mr. Robin Goodfellow, the puck was a mischievous witty spirit in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” who was constantly getting into trouble, by “poking people the wrong way” if you may. So the word “puck” we know now literally came from the old English word to poke.

The first hockey pucks were made from wood and cut from the branches of trees. Before the modern day puck was invented in 1860, hockey players had been using a Hurley ball, which was uncontrollable and cumbersome on the ice due to it bouncing all over the ice. Also man y times a block of wood was used when the Hurley ball was not available, this alone brought about its own set of issues. However depending on your source of information some would claim that in 1875, students at Boston University sliced a rubber ball in half to make a puck. Another version places its origination in Montreal Quebec, Canada. Victoria Rink owner of one of the first indoor ice rinks (where the terminology originates) allegedly sliced a rubber ball in half. In any case, the first “recorded” use of a flat disk was in Montreal in March 1875.

In the early years of hockey history, pucks were made by gluing two pieces of rubber together many times made from recycled tires. Because of the way they were constructed, the pucks could split when they hit the goal post. During the 1931 and 1932 seasons, a puck with sloped, beveled edges was used. Midway through the season complaints by players and teams had escalated so, that it led to the return of the original design of the puck. Though there was really no official professional puck until the 1990-1991 season, the basic design from the early 1900s remained basically the same. Today hockey pucks are flat, solid, black disk shaped objects made from vulcanized rubber. Regulation National Hockey League pucks are black and are 3 inches in diameter, 1 inch thick and weighing 5 or 6 ounces. On the edges a series of diamond shape slightly raised bumps have been molded to it. The diamonds give a taped hockey stick something to grip on to when the puck is shot. The design of NHL regulation pucks were regularized in 1940 by Art Ross. Although pucks remained basically the same from the way they were originally designed, Ross’s innovations made a puck that was easy to manufacture and acted with better consistency when used in play.

Hockey is one of the few sports that through the years have not deviated much from its original form thus making it still to this day one of the few rare pure sports. Keep hockey history alive and well!

~Zain on the East Coast

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When you think about how much you enjoy hockey, what, do you suppose, keeps you enthralled? Many people admire the talent and skill of the players, while others appreciate a good fight now and then. For most, however, it’s the fast-paced action that keeps their eyes glued to the game.

This year, over 5 million people in the US tuned in to watch the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Would you have tuned in if ten guys politely passed the puck around, only to score when the goalie wasn’t paying attention? Of course not! Which is why you can thank The Colored Hockey League (CHL) for evolving the primitive “gentleman’s game” of hockey.

Despite whatever you want to think about the sport, hockey was not always a game of speed and skill. Hockey was, simply put, a pastime of men.

The year was 1895 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a year when many white people believed Africans were intolerant to cold and supposedly hadn’t the ankles to support themselves on ice skates. Considering many of the African players had fathers and grandfathers who literally walked to Nova Scotia from Colonial America, it’s probably safe to assume both myths can be debunked.

Originally, these African-Canadians formed clubs which met for games by formal invitation to one another only. In 1900, they formed the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes for the three areas of Canada these clubs represented: Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick.

The CHL was composed of approximately 400 players, primarily Baptist ministers and church laymen, who were comparable to any of the contemporary players in Canada. They defied the stereotypical myths that oppressed them and molded the game of hockey into the stark competitive sport it is today.

You can thank Eddie Martin, who is the grandfather of the slap shot. Without it, Chris Kelly couldn’t have scored the game-winning goal against the Washington capitals during the playoff opener this year!

Likewise, goalies everywhere can give applause to the CHL, which first allowed them to cover the puck with their feet.

Unfortunately, these and other game-changing contributions are often conveniently ignored and overlooked. Occasionally, the CHL’s ideas were flat out stolen by fellow white hockey players of the time.

It was this kind of mentality which led to the eventual demise of the Colored Hockey League. Due to racism and discrimination against the African-Canadians, largely because of fear they were gaining power through their sport, the CHL was quickly dissolved in 1925.

-Dan “The Wisconsin Hockey Fan”

Every hockey fan can tell the story of his or her favorite game. Some will go so far as to learn all the stats of their all-time favorite player or even team. And some go beyond all normal human capabilities and remember every detail about anything hockey.

Looking at air hockey history, it’s not surprising that the game was conceived and popularized by a die-hard hockey fan. In 1969, the engineering of the game and the function of the table began with three employees of the Brunswick Company, a popular pool table manufacturer. Phil Crossman, Bob Kenrick, and Brad Baldwin worked to create a friction-less designed game table, but the design was left dormant because, so far, the friction-less table didn’t seem to hold any value in gaming.

The game of air hockey, as we know it today, was not created until 1972. Bob Lemieux, another employee of Brunswick and an avid hockey fan, conceptualized a game using two mallets to knock the flattened disks into the small slits on either far-side of the table. The air kept the disks perpetually moving and offered similar effects of a hockey puck on ice. He then created detectors in the slits that recorded when a goal was scored. Air hockey was born.The original air hockey table patent references Lemieux, as well as, Kenrick and Crossman as creators of the game.

Air Hockey History: Popularizing the Game

The game of air hockey became an almost instant gaming success, namely at carnivals and in college game rooms. Despite the growing success however, Brunswick soon became displeased by the image of air hockey as a carnival attraction and set out to legitimatize the game as a serious sport. in 1974, Brunswick held the first ever Air Hockey World Championship at the Holiday Inn in New York City.

Regional champions attended to compete for a $5000 purse. For the event, in a further attempt to make air hockey legitimate, legendary sportscaster Marv Albert announced the play-by-play, and NHL hockey star Derek “The Turk” Sanderson attended the event as a special guest. In all accounts, the event was a success, and an interest in air hockey tournaments swelled through the 70s.

In 1975, the United States Air-Table Hockey Association was formed by Philip Arnold, an avid player, to uniform rules and implement regulations. It is still the authority and governing body of air hockey to this day. The USAA has hosted an United States Championship and World Championship every year since its inception. It is interesting to note that Philip Arnold has never won the World Championships, but he has come in second 4 times.

Air Hockey Starts to Deflate

If there was ever a dark time in air hockey history, it was in the mid-80s with the advent of arcade games. With the onset of computer technology and gaming in arcades, air hockey quickly took a back seat to the new games.

Air hockey may have died out if it wasn’t for one air hockey fan, Mark Robbins. Robbins took out an ad in a trade magazine asking people to donate their old air hockey tables. He was afraid that company’s would completely stop manufacturing. He collected tables from across the country and remodeled them in the original Brunswick design. He then convinced U.S. Billiards, the only remaining air hockey table manufacturer, to create new, better quality tables in the original design.

In 1985, Robbins also convinced Dynamo Corporation, a foosball table maker, to begin creating tournament-quality air hockey tables. In that first year, only an estimated 100 were sold, but by the time he stopped his effort to revive the sport in 1993, the company had begun selling thousands.

Just like most sports, air hockey history is made up of individuals that were passionate enough to keep it growing. Because of this, it is now as popular as ever, 40 years later.

~Zain on the East Coast

Highway Eleven is the longest road in Canada.  It starts in Toronto and loops up through Quebec and Ontario before it crosses into the US at Baudette, Minnesota.  Highway 11 runs through northern Minnesota through Warroad (The Original Hockey Town USA) and Roseau (The Capital of the State of Hockey) before running into North Dakota.  There are over 70 NHL players who have come from small towns along Hwy 11.

The NHL has been around longer than most of its other professional sport league counterparts, but its draft was one of the last developed. Since the league’s official development in 1917, the NHL managed without a draft until 1963, almost fifty years later.

If you were a hockey fan in 1974, you might remember Taro Tsujimoto, the star center of the Tokyo Katanas of the Japan Ice Hockey League (JIHL). He was the eleventh round pick of Buffalo Sabres’ general manager “Punch” Imlach, a man well known for both his bark and his bite.

For those of you thinking, “Wasn’t Tsujimoto bogus?” You’re absolutely right! As the story goes, Imlach was so frustrated with the lengthy draft that year he decided to create the fictional Japanese player in hopes of having some fun at the NHL’s expense. Not knowing any better, the league made the pick official: even The Hockey News claimed it a legitimate pick. It wasn’t until weeks later that Imlach revealed the truth of his pick.

More recently, in 2003, the Florida Panthers attempted to draft Alex Ovechkin, of Russia, but were not allowed. Why? The cut-off date for the NHL draft fell two days before his eighteenth birthday! Allegedly, the Panthers tried to convince the NHL that the extra days involved with it being a leap year should count toward Ovechkin’s age. Incidentally, 2003 was NOT a leap year.

While on the topic of players who didn’t originate from Canada, how many do you suppose were players drafted first, overall into the NHL? Of the forty-six players chosen first overall, eleven were not from Canada. That’s less than a quarter of the players! The eleven are as follows, including draft year and origin:

Brian Lawton, 1983, US
Mike Modano, 1988, US
Mats Sundin, 1989, Sweden
Roman Hamrlik, 1992, Czech Republic
Bryan Berard, 1995, US
Patrik Stefan, 1999, Czech Republic
Rick DiPietro, 2000, US
Ilya Kovalchuk, 2001, Russia
Alexander Ovechkin, 2004, Russia
Erik Johnson, 2006, US
Patrick Kane, 2007, US

Finally, of the forty-six players ever drafted as first overall in the Entry Draft, only two played as goaltender, Rick DiPietro, in 2000 to the New York Islanders and Marc-Andre Fleury to the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2003. There was only one previous goaltender ever drafted, Michel Plasse of Montreal, to the Canadiens. However, Plasse was drafted during the days of the Amateur Draft and is generally discounted.

Before reading this article, did you know any of these facts? How many other sports can claim such oddities in their own draft histories?

-Dan “The Wisconsin Hockey Fan”