Ice hockey

Ice hockey, known simply as hockey in Canada and the United States, 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. The most prominent ice hockey nations are Canada, United States, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Switzerland.

Tactics

An important defensive tactic is checking – attempting to take the puck from an opponent or to remove the opponent from play. Forechecking is checking in the other team's zone, backchecking is checking while the other team is advancing down the ice toward one's own goal; these terms usually are applied to checking by forwards. Stick checking, sweep checking, and poke checking are legal uses of the stick to obtain possession of the puck. Body checking is using one's shoulder or hip to strike an opponent who has the puck or who is the last to have touched it.

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Offensive tactics include improving a team's position on the ice by advancing the puck out of one's zone towards the opponent's zone, progressively by gaining lines, first your own blue line, then the red line and finally the opponent's blue line.

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Offensive tactics are designed ultimately to score a goal by taking a shot. When a player purposefully directs the puck towards the opponent's goal, he or she is said to shoot the puck.

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A deflection is a shot which redirects a shot or a pass towards the goal from another player, by allowing the puck to strike the stick and carom towards the goal. A one-timer is a shot which is struck directly off a pass, without receiving the pass and shooting in two separate actions.

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A deke (short for decoy) is a feint with the body and/or stick to fool a defender or the goalie. Headmanning the puck is the tactic of rapidly passing to the player farthest down the ice.

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A team that is losing by one or two goals in the last few minutes of play may elect to pull the goalie; that is, removing the goaltender and replacing him or her with an extra attacker on the ice in the hope of gaining enough advantage to score a goal. However, this tactic is extremely risky, and as often as not leads to the winning team scoring a goal in the empty net.

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Although it is officially prohibited in the rules, at the professional level fights are sometimes used to affect morale of the teams, with aggressors hoping to demoralize the opposing players while exciting their own, as well as settling personal scores. Both players in an altercation receive five-minute major penalties for fighting. The player deemed to be the "instigator" of an NHL fight is penalized an additional two minutes for instigating, plus a ten-minute misconduct penalty. This so-called instigator rule is highly controversial in NHL hockey: many coaches, sportswriters, players and fans feel it prevents players from effectively policing the objectionable behavior of their peers, which is often cleverly hidden from referees. They point to less extreme on-ice violence during the era before the rule was introduced. Toronto Maple Leafs owner Conn Smythe famously observed that "If you can't beat 'em in the alley you can't beat 'em on the ice."

Related Topics:
Fights - Toronto Maple Leafs - Conn Smythe

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