Sports 360: Ice Hockey

By Kelly Kinas ‘16

Hockey is a pretty vague term but there is also field hockey (and my person favorite arcade game, air hockey). Specifically, this blog is about the rules, teams, and history of ice hockey. Hockey isn’t the most common sport in Los Angeles, even while the Kings are very popular, but that might be because the Staples Center is a great place to escape the heat in the summer months. Hockey is actually a pretty amazing sport! Theses guys need to be huge enough to hit another guy into a wall but still graceful enough to skate around the rink. It’s an interesting sport that a solid amount of West and Southwest people do not know too much about. Which is why I am here for you!!

GOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAL (the hockey kind, not the soccer kind)

Hockey is Canada’s national winter sport, I’m sure, but we, Americans, are pretty decent at it too. It’s mostly popular in the East and Midwest, you know the places who actually get snow and water actually freezes to ice. In general, it is a contact team sport played on ice, usually in a rink, in which two teams of skaters use their sticks to shoot a puck into their opponent’s net to score points. Ice hockey teams usually consist of 6 players each, 1 goaltender and five players who skate up and down the ice trying to take the puck and score a goal against the opposing team.

You can substitute as much as you want in hockey and if you watch a professional hockey game, they substitute pretty often because it’s a lot of skating and a rough sport overall.

The governing body of ice hockey in the US and Canada is the NHL, National Hockey League. The NHL was founded in 1917 in Montreal, Canada. There are 30 teams, 23 of them in the United States and 7 of them in Canada. Their championships is called the Stanley Cup. The latest winners of the Stanley Cup are the Chicago Blackhawks but the Montreal Canadiens have won the most Stanley Cups, with 25. 

The NHL is one of the four major sports organizations in the US, other than the NFL, MLB, and NBA.

GAMES:

Each National Hockey League regulation game is 60 minutes long. The game is composed of three 20-minute periods (they’re called periods in Hockey, not halves or quarters, because there are 3 of them) with an intermission between periods. At the end of regulation time, the team with the most goals wins the game. If a game is tied after regulation time, overtime ensues. During the regular season, overtime is a five-minute, three-on-three sudden-death period, in which whoever scores a goal first will win the game. 

If the game is still tied at the end of overtime, the game enters a shootout. Three players for each team in turn take a penalty shot. The team with the most goals during the three-round shootout wins the game. If the game is still tied after the three shootout rounds, the shootout continues but becomes sudden-death. Whichever team ultimately wins the shootout is awarded a goal in the game score and thus awarded two points in the standings. The losing team in overtime or shootout is awarded only one.

HOCKEY RINK:

National Hockey League games are played on a rectangular hockey rink with rounded corners surrounded by walls and Plexiglas. It measures 200 feet (60.96 m) by 85 feet (25.91 m) in the NHL, approximately the same length but much narrower than International Ice Hockey Federation standards. The centre line divides the ice in half, and is used to judge icing violations. There are two blue lines that divide the rink roughly into thirds, delineating one neutral and two attacking zones. Near the end of both ends of the rink, there is a thin red goal line spanning the width of the ice, which is used to judge goals and icing calls.

NHL RULES:

Offsides

• In ice hockey, play is said to be offside if a player on the attacking team crosses the offensive blue line and into the offensive zone before the puck (unless the defensive team brings the puck into their own zone). A violation occurs when an offside player touches the puck. If a player crosses the line ahead of the puck but his team is not in possession of it, the linesman will raise his arm to signal a delayed offside

Icing

• Icing occurs when a player shoots the puck across both the center line and the opposing team’s goal line without the puck going through the goal crease. When icing occurs, a linesman stops play if a defending player (other than the goaltender) crosses the imaginary line that connects the two faceoff dots in their defensive zone before an attacking player is able to. Play is resumed with a faceoff in the defending zone of the team that committed the infraction
  

Penalties

• A penalty is a punishment for infractions of the rules. A referee makes most penalty calls while the linesmen may call only obvious technical infractions such as too many men on the ice. In the NHL, the linesmen may also stop play due to player injury, and may report to the referees during any stoppage in play, any circumstances pertaining to major, match, or misconduct penalties, abuse of officials (physical or otherwise), unsportsmanlike conduct, or double-minor penalties for high-sticking causing injury, that were not detected by the referees.
  
• During a penalty, the player who committed the infraction is sent to the penalty box.
  
• This situation is called a power play for the non-penalized team and a penalty kill for the penalized team. A team is far more likely to score on a power play than during normal play. If the penalized team is scored on during a minor penalty, the penalty immediately terminates.
  

FUN FACTS:

• The maximum number of players on an NHL roster is 23. A team can have a maximum of 50 signed players and a total of 90 players(unsigned and signed).
  
• There is the regular season and the postseason
• In the regular season, each team plays 82 games: 41 games each of home and road.
  
• The Stanley Cup playoffs, which go from April to the beginning of June, is an elimination tournament where two teams play against each other to win a best-of-seven series in order to advance to the next round. The final remaining team is crowned the Stanley Cup champion.
  

Are you guys ready to smash some people into the wall of a hockey rink now??

I hope so! You now know the basics of a hockey game. You got this. Blow everyone away at the next game (or at least, you’ll be able to not ask as many questions).

Fight on!