Hockey-Minors

Ice hockey, referred to simply as hockey in Canada, United States, Russia and Latvia is a team sport played on ice. Ice hockey is most popular as a sport in areas that are sufficiently cold for natural, reliable seasonal ice cover. more...

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It is one of the four major North American professional sports, represented by the National Hockey League (NHL) at the highest level. It is the official national winter sport of Canada, where the game enjoys immense popularity, and is also the most popular spectator sport in Finland. Only six of the thirty NHL franchises are based in Canada, but Canadians outnumber Americans in the league by a ratio of almost four to one. About thirty percent of the league's players are non-North American. The sport's popularity in the U.S. is concentrated in certain regions, notably the Northeast, the Upper Midwest, and Alaska. This concentration helps to make ice hockey the least watched major sport in the United States, though it is by far the most watched sport in Canada. Nonetheless, in certain major U.S. cities (notably Buffalo, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Chicago, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Denver) it commands popularity levels similar to and occasionally exceeding basketball for winter sports fans.

Ice hockey is a physically demanding sport, due to the high tempo and quick changes in puck possession during a typical game. On a full-sized rink, a player who merely coasts or who is relatively stationary will be of little use to his or her team. Players may leave play and return later, so, in a competitive game, they typically play in shifts of from thirty to forty-five seconds to maintain the fast pace.

While there are 64 total members of the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF), Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden and the United States have finished in most of the coveted 1st, 2nd and 3rd places at IIHF World Championships. Of the 63 medals awarded in men's competition at the Olympic level from 1920 on, only six did not go to the one of those countries, or a former entity thereof, such as Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union. Only one of those six medals was above bronze. Those seven nations have also captured 162 of 177 medals awarded at 59 non-Olympic IIHF World Championships, and all medals since 1954. Likewise, all nine Olympic and 27 IIHF World Women Championships medals have gone to one of those seven countries. Also deserving of mention is Switzerland, which has won two men's bronze medals at the Olympics and finished at least third seven times at the World Championships. Switzerland also maintains one of the oldest and top-rated ice hockey leagues (the Swiss Nationalliga) outside of the NHL.

History

Games between teams hitting an object with curved sticks have been played throughout history; 4000 year-old drawings at the Beni-Hasen tombs in Egypt depict a sport resembling field hockey. The 1527 Galway Statutes in Ireland made reference to "the horlinge of the litill balle with hockie stickes or staves." The etymology of the word hockey is uncertain. It may derive from the Old French word hoquet, shepherd's crook, or from the Middle Dutch word hokkie, meaning shack or doghouse, which in popular use meant goal. Many of these games were developed for fields, though where conditions allowed they were also played on ice. 16th-century Dutch paintings show townsfolk playing a hockey-like game on a frozen canal.

Read more at Wikipedia.org