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Many hockey fans believe the hockey puck was named for the character in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream. | |
Like the irrpressible Puck, the hockey disk moves very quickly, often in least expected directions.
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The longest NHL playoff game in history happened on March 24, 1936 with nearly six periods of sudden death overtime. | |
The game remained deadlocked at 0 - 0 between the Detroit Red Wings and Montreal Maroons through 116 minutes and 30 seconds of overtime. Martin (Mud) Bruteneau scored the winning goal for the Maroons.
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Montreal Canadiens' goalie Jacque Plante is credited with changing the face of hockey forever by becoming the first goalie to wear a mask after a November 1, 1959 slap-shot shattered his nose, requiring 7 stitches. | |
Plante refused to return to the ice without a mask despite head coach Toe Blake's strong reservations. He recorded no losses over his next 18 games wearing the mask.
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Men's hockey was introduced as an Olympic sport at the Antwerp games in 1920. Women's hockey was added to the Olympic Winter Games programme in Nagano in 1998. | |
Canada's Olympic Men's Team has won seven gold, four silver and two bronze medals. Canada's Olympic Women's Team has won two gold and one silver medal in three Olympic Games.
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George Owen, who wore a leather helmet during his first season with the Boston Bruins in 1928, may be the first NHL player to wear some form of head protection. | |
Before Owen, Quebec Bulldos' Herb Scott wore a pink handkerchief around his head in a game against Ottawa in 1892. And referee Mike Grant wore a hard hat in 1905, expecting particularly rough play in a Stanley Cup game.
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The Stanley Cup has been stolen and recovered four times. The first theft happened in Chicago in 1962. | |
A Montreal Canadiens fan, distraught his team was losing its playoff semi-final series to the then-defending-champion Blackhawks, grabbed the Cup from a lobby display case and bolted. When he was later arrested by stadium police, the fan said, "I was taking the Cup back to Montreal where it belongs." The three other robberies occured at the Hockey Hall of Fame.
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In 1893, Canada's Governor General, Lord Stanley, donated a trophy to recognize Canada's top-ranking amateur hockey club. The Stanley Cup was only 7 inches high and cost US$50. | |
Lord Stanley intended to name the trophy the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup, but the two professional hockey organizations at the time agreed to compete for the Stanley Cup. Today the base of the Stanley Cup is over 35 inches high.
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The location of the first women's hockey game is disputed. According to the Canadian Hockey Association the first recorded women's hockey game took place in 1892 in Barrie, Ontario. | |
"Total Hockey," the official encyclopedia of the NHL, claims the first game took place in Ottawa in 1889 between the Government House team and the Rideau Ladies team. By the turn of the century, women's hockey was played across Canada.
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Bernie Geoffrion is credited with bringing the slap-shot to the NHL in 1951. The thundering shot earned him the nickname "Boom Boom." | |
Along with superstars Jean Beliveau and Maurice (Rocket) Richard, the Hall of Fame winger helped the Montreal Canadiens dominate the NHL in 1950s and 1960s.
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Early hockey games allowed as many as 30 players on the ice from each team. | |
When hockey was first played inside a covered rink in Montreal, the teams limited the number of players to nine a side, which soon became seven. In 1912, the number of players was reduced from seven to six, including a goalie, with the elimination of the "Rover" position.
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The first mechanically-refrigerated ice rink was built in 1876, at Chelsea, London, England. | |
Named the Glaciarium, the 40 x 24 foot ice surface was built near the King's Road in London by John Gamgee. The private rink was available only to "noblemen and gentlemen under certain conditions." Building the Glaciarium cost £20,000.
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The Montreal Amateur Athletic Association (MAAA) won the first Stanley Cup Championship in 1893. The MAAA won the Cup again in 1894 and 1902. | |
From the 1890s to the 1930s, players on the Stanley Cup Championship team scratched their names into the original silver bowl using a knife or nail.
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The oldest pair of skates ever found, dating back to approximately 3000 B.C., was recovered from the bottom of a lake in Switerland. | |
In 1857, the first hockey skate, called the Long Reach Skate, was invented by 18-year-old James Whelpley of New Brunswick. His design was the first skate to use leather straps and buckles to fasten the baldes to the skaters boots.
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The Stanley Cup has taken a lot of abuse over time. In 1905, celebrating players from the Ottawa Sliver Seven punted the Cup into the Rideau Canal. | |
The Cup was rescued from the chilly waters the next day. Two years later, the Montreal Wanderers left the Cup at the home of a photographer they hired to immortalize their victory. The photographer's mother turned hockey's Holy Grail into a flower pot for the next several months.
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In 1896, George Merritt of the Winnipeg Victorias was the first goalie to wear cricket pads during the Stanley Cup playoffs. | |
Cricket pads were adopted league-wide until 1917, when the first hockey pads were invented. Before the use of cricket pads, goalies wore the same equipment as the other players.
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The word "hockey," as Canada's offical winter sport came to be known, was derived from the French word "hoquet," meaning shepherd's crook. | |
Hockey had no offical name when it began to emerge in Ontario, Nova Scotia and Quebec. It was referred to as hurley, wicket, ricket and break-shins in various books and articles throughout the 1800s.
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Since 1892, the Stanley Cup has been awarded in all but two seasons. The first was the 1918-1919 season because of an outbreak of Spanish Influenza. | |
The second was in 2004-2005 because of the NHL lockout. An even playoff series between the Montreal Canadiens and the Seattle Metropolitians in 1919 was eventually cancelled when six Montreal players were taken to hospital with the flu.
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Immortalized by the Tragically Hip song Fifty-Mission Cap, Toronto Maple Leaf, Bill Barilko scored the winning goal in game seven of the Stanley Cup championship against the Montreal Canadiens in 1951.
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Tragically, Barilko disappeared on a fishing trip that same summer. The Leafs didn't win another Stanley Cup until 1962, the year his body was discovered.
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Ice hockey evloved from hurley, a stick and ball game played in Ireland as early as 1066. The shape of the stick's blades resembles modern hockey sticks. | |
In the early 1800s Nova Scotians began playing hurley on ice rinks because Nova Scotia's fields were too rough during the winter months. Ice hurley was first played on Nova Scotia's Long Pond, considered by many to be the birthplace of ice hockey.
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At Montreal's Victoria Rink on March 3, 1875, the first organized hockey game was played with a referee and an offical set of rules. | |
The game, featuring the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association (MAAA) verses the Victoria Skating Club, attracted a great deal of publicity. Offical rules were published in the Montreal Gazette along with the team rosters before the game, as well as the game's final score the following day. Ironically (or perhaps not), the first refereed game ended in a brawl.
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College teams from Canada and the United States played the first international hockey series in 1895. Canada won all four games. | |
This series sparked interest in hockey in the eastern United States, resulting in many Amercian college and club teams taking up the sport.
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The Kenora Thistles won the Stanley Cup championship in 1907, becoming the smallest city in North Amercia to win a major sporting championship. | |
At the time, Kenora was primarily a mining and logging community with 6,000 residents. Local boys Eddie Giroux, "Bad" Joe Hall and Art Ross travelled to Montreal, besting the Wanders in both series games 4-2 and 8-6.
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In 1886, the first rubber puck was dropped at the final league game between the Royal Military College Athletics and Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. | |
The Queens beat the Athletics three to zero. The first puck, dubbed "the Kingston puck," was cut from a lacrosse ball in an octagonal shape.
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Billy (The Beaver) Coutu of the Michigan Soo Indians, the first Native Amercian player to join an NHL team, began his ten year career in 1917-18 with the Montreal Canadiens. | |
Coutu played three seasons in Montreal, then joined the Hamilton Tigers for a year, before returning to the Montreal Canadiens for five seasons. His final year in the NHL was with the Boston Bruins in 1926-27, although he continued to play with the New Haven Eagles and the Newark Bulldogs of the CAHL and the Minneapolis Millers of the AHA, before retiring in 1931 at the age of 39.
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AJHL Alumnus and Hall of Famer, Mark (the Moose) Messier started his professional hockey career with the Spruce Grove Saints in 1976. | |
Messier scored 694 goals and 1,193 assists during 25 seasons in the NHL. His many career accolades include two Hart Memorial trophies, two Lester B. Pearson trophies and a Conn Smythe trophy. Messier won five Stanley Cups with the Edmonton Oilers and one with the New York Rangers. He received much of the credit for ending the New York Rangers 42-year Stanley Cup drought in 1994.
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The first hockey sticks were carved from Ironwood by the Mi'kmaq natives of Nova Scotia. | |
The early sticks were shorter and thicker than today's hockey sticks, with an up-turned blade similar to field hockey sticks. As hockey grew in popularity, it quickly out grew the Native carvers' capicity for making sticks. To fill the void, the Starr Manufacturing Company of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, began manufacturing hockey sticks on an industrial scale. They named their sticks "Mic Mac" after the native carvers.
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Hockey Night in Canada (HNIC) broadcast its first game in 1952 between the Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs, with Imperial Oil as the sponser.
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In fact, HNIC's Three Star Selection was originally a promotion for Imperial Oil's gasoline. HNIC is credited with pioneeriing the use of instant replays, ice-level cameras to capture action around the nets, and directional microphones to record each bone-crushing hit. HNIC's famous theme music, The Hockey Theme, was written by Dolores Claman in 1968.
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The first hockey goal mouth consisted of two rocks placed at each end of the ice rink, followed by a period when two vertical posts were used. | |
It's uncertin who first decided to add netting to the posts. However, as early as 1896, Niagara players from the Southern Ontario Association fastened fishing net to the goal posts to avoid arguments over golas. Hockey nets began spreading across Canada that same year.
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Edmonton Oilers coach Craig MacTavish was the last player in NHL history to play without a helmet. | |
Surprisingly helmeted players weren't a common sight until the early 1970s. Before then, helmets were only used by players recovering from injuries. The NHL Board of Governors passed a decree before the start of the 1979-80 season that required every new NHL player to wear a helmet from that point forward.
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In 1989, Sergei Priakin joined the Calgary Flames, becoming the first Russian player permitted by the Soviet Ice Hockey Federation to play in the NHL. | |
Within a few years, the Soviet Ice Hockey Federation was reformed and Russian players began joining NHL teams en masse. The new system gave Russian players unable to make their national team an alternate career path. Priakin made his debut against the Winnipeg Jets on March 31, 1989. |
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