Hockey is a term used to denote a family of various types of both summer and winter team sports which originated on either an outdoor field, sheet of ice, or dry floor such as in a gymnasium. While these sports vary in specific rules, numbers of players, apparel, and playing surface, they share broad characteristics of two opposing teams using a stick to propel a ball or disk into a goal.
Ice hockey is a team sport played on ice skates, usually on an ice skating rink with lines and markings specific to the sport. It belongs to a family of sports called hockey. In ice hockey, two opposing teams use ice hockey sticks to control, advance, and shoot a closed, vulcanized, rubber disc called a "puck" into the other team's goal. Each goal is worth one point. The team which scores the most goals is declared the winner. In a formal game, each team has six skaters on the ice at a time, barring any penalties, one of whom is the goaltender. Ice hockey is a full contact sport, and is considered to be one of the more physically demanding team sports.
A hockey puck is either an open or closed disk used in a variety of sports and games. There are designs made for use on an ice surface, such as in ice hockey, and others for the different variants of floor hockey which includes the wheeled skate variant of inline hockey. They are all designed to serve the same function a ball does in ball games.
Air hockey is a Pong-like tabletop sport where two opposing players try to score goals against each other on a low-friction table using two hand-held discs ("mallets") and a lightweight plastic puck.
The centre in hockey is a forward position of a player whose primary zone of play is the middle of the ice, away from the sideboards. Centres have more flexibility in their positioning and therefore often end up covering more ice surface than any other player. Centres are ideally strong, fast skaters who are able to back-check quickly from deep in the opposing zone. Generally, centres are expected to be gifted passers more so than goal scorers, although there are exceptions - typically larger centres who position themselves directly in front of the net in order to score off rebounds. They are also expected to have exceptional "ice vision", Hockey IQ, intelligence, and creativity. They also generally are the most defensively-oriented forwards on the ice, as they are expected to play the role of the third player in defense, after the defencemen. Centres usually play as part of a line of players that are substituted frequently to keep fresh and keep the game moving.
In ice hockey, the goaltender is the player responsible for preventing the hockey puck from entering their team's net, thus preventing the opposing team from scoring. The goaltender mostly plays in or near the area in front of the net called the goal crease. Goaltenders tend to stay at or beyond the top of the crease to cut down on the angle of shots. In the modern age of goaltending there are two common styles, butterfly and hybrid. Because of the power of shots, the goaltender wears special equipment to protect the body from direct impact.
A penalty in ice hockey is a punishment for an infringement of the rules. Most penalties are enforced by sending the offending player to a penalty box for a set number of minutes. During the penalty the player may not participate in play. Penalties are called and enforced by the referee, or in some cases, the linesman. The offending team may not replace the player on the ice, leaving them short-handed as opposed to full strength. When the opposing team is said to be on a power play, they will have one more player on the ice than the short-handed team. The short-handed team is said to be "on the penalty kill" until the penalty expires and the penalized player returns to play. While standards vary somewhat between leagues, most leagues recognize several common varieties of penalties, as well as common infractions.
ITHF table hockey is a sport played on table hockey games. International Table Hockey Federation (ITHF) is an organization that oversees these competitions. The origin of the sport was the Swedish Championship 1982 in Upplands Väsby. Organized table hockey is played in northern, central and eastern Europe, in North America, but table hockey is also played in South America, Africa, Australia, and Asia.
Street hockey is a collection of team sport variants played outdoors either on foot or with wheeled skates, using a either a ball or puck designed for play on flat, dry surfaces. The object of every game is to score more goals than the opposing team by shooting the ball or puck into the opposing team's net. All games are derivatives of either the sport of ice hockey, floor hockey, bandy, and/or field hockey.
Floor hockey is a broad term for several indoor floor game codes which involve two teams using a stick and type of ball or disk. Disks are either open or closed but both designs are usually referred to as "pucks". These games are played either on foot or with wheeled skates. Variants typically reflect the style of ice hockey, field hockey, bandy or some other combination of sport. Games are commonly known by various names including cosom hockey, ball hockey, floorball, or simply floor hockey.
Roller in-line hockey, or inline hockey is a variant of hockey played on a hard, smooth surface, with players using inline skates to move and ice hockey sticks to shoot a hard, plastic puck into their opponent's goal to score points. The sport is a very fast-paced and free-flowing game and is considered a contact sport, but body checking is prohibited. There are five players including the goalkeeper from each team on the rink at a time, while teams normally consist of 16 players. There are professional leagues, one of which is the National Roller Hockey League (NRHL). While it is not a contact sport, there are exceptions, i.e. the NRHL involves fighting.
Table shuffleboard is a game in which players push metal-and-plastic weighted pucks down a long and smooth wooden table into a scoring area at the opposite end of the table. Shooting is performed with the hand directly, as opposed to deck shuffleboard's use of cue sticks.
The Miracle on Manchester is the nickname given to a National Hockey League (NHL) playoff game between the Los Angeles Kings and Edmonton Oilers that took place on April 10, 1982 in the league's 65th season. The game, the third in a best-of-five postseason series, was played at The Forum, the Kings' home arena at the time, which was situated on Manchester Boulevard in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood. The Kings completed the largest comeback in NHL playoff history, going from being down 5–0 to win the game in overtime, 6–5. Combined with upset wins in Games 1 and 5, the Kings eliminated the Gretzky-led Oilers in a 3–2 series victory to reach the second round.
Super Chexx® is a table hockey arcade game manufactured by Innovative Concepts in Entertainment Inc. (ICE) from 1988 to 2017. ICE began manufacturing CHEXX bubble hockey in 1982 and it quickly became one of the top-earning bar and arcade games of the 1980s. Enhancements to the game were added and it was renamed Super Chexx in 1988 and it continued to be popular in bars and arcades and received national acclaim during the Bud Light Bubble Boys tournament series from 1999 to 2001. In November 2017 Super Chexx was replaced with the Super Chexx Pro edition using enhanced electronics featuring a 5" LCD jumbotron and LED lighting. Super Chexx Pro is still made in the US in Clarence, New York just outside Buffalo. These types of games are also known as bubble hockey, rod hockey, table hockey or dome hockey because of the long rods used to control the players and the distinctive dome or "bubble" covering the playing field.
The National Hockey League rules are the rules governing the play of the National Hockey League (NHL), a professional ice hockey organization. Infractions of the rules, such as offside and icing, lead to a stoppage of play and subsequent to the offending teams. The league also determines the specifications for playing equipment used in its games.
This is a list of common terms used in the sport of ice hockey along with the definitions of these terms.
Pond hockey is a form of ice hockey similar in its object and appearance to traditional ice hockey, but simplified and designed to be played on part of a natural frozen body of water. The rink is 50 to 80 percent the size of a standard NHL-specification rink, and has no boards or glass surrounding it; usually only a barrier of snow keeps the puck in play. In addition, because there are no protective barriers behind the goal to contain high errant shots, the top of the goal is lower, in fact only slightly taller than the width of a puck, and the game does not have a formal goalie. Because of these differences, pond hockey places more emphasis on skating and puckhandling ability and less on shooting and checking. Non-competitive pond hockey is played with improvised goals, rinks of a variety of sizes, and no boards or snow barriers. There can only be 4 players playing per team at a time but have many subs to sub in.
In ice hockey, players use specialized equipment both to facilitate the play of the game and for protection as this is a sport where injuries are common, therefore, all players are encouraged to protect their bodies from bruises and severe fractures.
Box hockey is an active hand game played between two people with sticks, a puck and a compartmented box, and typically played outdoors. The object of the game is to move a hockey puck through the center dividers of the box, out through a hole placed at each end of the box, also known as the goal. The two players face one another on either side of the box, and each attempts to move the puck to their left. If a player succeeds in getting the puck to exit the box through the goal, the player scores one point. The first player to score the predetermined number of goals wins the game.
Tabletop football is a class of tabletop game simulating mainly association football, but also either of the codes of rugby, or some other form of football such as American football or Australian-rules football. The games employ miniature figures of players on a bounded playing board or table that looks like a football pitch (field).
