Hockey 101

Since I am writing blog posts about a sport that isn't as well known as football or basketball, I thought I would start out by explaining some of the basics. I will talk about some of the penalties, as well as some of other miscellaneous calls that can be made. I will start out with the most common,

Offsides

Offsides is when any member of the attacking team precedes the puck over the defending team's blue line. Delayed offsides is when a member of the attacking team is across the blue line, and then the puck is shot into the zone. In the case of a delayed offside, all attacking players must leave the zone before they can play the puck.

Icing

When a player shoots the puck across the center red line and past the opposing red goal line. Icing is not called if the player's team is killing a penalty, a teammate of the player shooting the puck touches it before a player from the opposing team, the defending goalie touches the puck first or if the puck travels through the crease (semicircle of blue paint in front of the goal) on its way to the red line.

This diagram should help illustrate what both icing and offsides mean.

Those are the two main rules of hockey. But there is also quite a few penalties that can be called. A team plays shorthanded when one or more of its players is charged with a penalty. However, no team is forced to play more than two players below full strength (five skaters) at any time. If a third penalty is assessed to the same team, it is suspended until the first penalty expires. When a penalty is called on a goalie, a teammate serves his time in the penalty box.

Minor Penalties

Two minutes - Called for boarding, charging, cross-checking, elbowing, holding, hooking, high-sticking, interference, roughing, slashing, spearing, tripping and unsportsmanlike conduct.

Major Penalties

Five minutes - Called for fighting or when minor penalties are committed with deliberate intent to injure. Major penalties for slashing, spearing, high-sticking, butt-ending and cross-checking carry automatic game misconducts.

Misconducts

Ten minutes - Called for various forms of unsportsmanlike behavior or when a player incurs a second major penalty in a game. This is a penalty against an individual and not a team, so a substitute is permitted.

You now know a little bit about the basics of hockey. I tried to make it as simple as possible while paraphrasing from an old rulebook I had from when I officiated hockey games, and I hope this post was helpful. To help explain the finer things about hockey and conclude this post, I must enlist a clip from one of my favorite movies, Slapshot.

Thanks for reading!