Dan Mi Photography

Hockey - as all other team sports, is a competition and people love to figure out who is best. Which means points get assigned to figure this out.

Since it’s a team sport, the most important information is the team standing. It’s what you look up to figure out if a team overall is doing well, if they will make the playoffs (or, depending on league, have to go to play downs/ups). But while there’s no “i” in team, they still are made up of individuals, so every player gets points, too.

points for teams:

• a win (W) nets your team 2 points, no matter if the win was achieved during regular play time, in overtime (OT, through a golden goal ending the game), or by scoring more goals in a shootout
  
• managing to draw in regulation (after 60 minutes) means your team has 1 point no matter if they win or lose, one additional for the winning team (again, 2 points in total for a win)
• games never end in a draw, your team either wins or loses. If there’s no decision during regulation, the game goes into overtime, if there’s still no decision after that the game goes to penalties

points for players:

• each player is awarded points when they score a goal or assist on a goal
  
• scoring a goal means they are the last player to touch the puck when a goal is scored
• assisting means they are one of the last two players to touch the puck before the player who scored the goal did so
• if a player of the opposing team touches the puck before the player who scores the goal does so, the goal is “unassisted” and only a point for the scorer is awarded
• there are now own goals; so pucks that deflect of a defense player or goalie are awarded to the last player of the opposing team (that’s how many goalies get assists)

there are more statistics (of course) but those are the most important ones.

Thanks to this post, you know where the teams play. Let’s get to the how.

Time:

• a game consists of 3 periods (thirds) each 20 minutes actual game time
• the two intermissions or breaks in between (usually) last 15 minutes
• there will be multiple interruption in each period, prolonging the time needed for a game (pro hockey games mean you spend 2 hours or more at the stadium watching people doing something on the ice)

games get interrupted by the referees for different reasons:

• goals; if a goal is scored, the game is interrupted and starts at the faceoff spot in the middle of the field (in the middle of the neutral zone)
  
• save; if the goaltender (goalie) catches the puck or the puck is buried under the goalie (or just nobody knows where the puck is and the ref assumes it’s somewhere under/on the goalie; if you are curious what I mean by that, watch this youtube video)
• infractions (breaking the rules) - usually this leads to a penalty
• puck out of play - when the puck leaves the playing field by going over the boards or if it’s stuck between player and board and the ref decides it’s been too long since the puck has been played

players:

• there are two teams (duh)
  
• for each game, there is a maximum of 22 players on each team
• each team has (at maximum) 6 players on the ice at any time
• usually there is 1 goalie playing and one line of field players, each line consisting of 2 defense players and 3 offensive players
• there is no limit on how often a coach can switch players during a game
• usually they switch out a whole line (line change)
  
• (line) changes happen during interruptions (scored goals, fouls, icing, …) as well as during regular game play
  
• sometimes a coach decides to pull the goalie and replace them with a sixth field player - this is mostly done when the team trails behind at the end of the last period
• sometimes there are fewer players on the ice because of penalties - meaning a player is penalized for a foul and taken off the ice without being replaced; more see the post about penalties which I’ll link to as soon as it exists
  

A short run down about the different player positions:

• Obviously we have the goalies (and there will be another post just about goalies; you’ll learn about my favoritism soon enough). Their job is the easiest to describe and arguably the hardest to do: they stop the opposing team from scoring by catching or blocking pucks shot at the net
• Then we have two defensive players. They are positioned in front of the goalie to the right and left side; they try to take the puck before opposing players can shoot at the goal
• Additionally there are three offensive players: center, left and right wing. The center sets up the game play while the wingers try to score (which doesn’t mean that they are the only players to ever score, there are even goalies who scored in regular games, as you can see in this youtube video)

The absolute basics - as if I was explaining hockey to an alien who just knows most humans have two extremities to stand on and two to swing with.

Ice hockey is played either in a stadium or an outside rink on ice.

There are two basic layouts for these rinks, NHL (National Hockey League - which means North America) and IIHF (International Ice Hockey Federation - which means everywhere else). The former is what NHL teams play on, the latter what standard rinks in Germany (for example; also the rest of the world) look like. There are also in-between forms and nonstandard ones.

First a general text version for screen readers before I have the NHL and IIHF versions as pictures; there’ll be a text portion afterwards explaining the commonalities and differences as well.

We have a rectangular field surrounded by boards on all sides; the corners are rounded.

Starting on the left and going lengthwise, we have:

• the boards behind the net/goal which are the beginning of the defensive zone because this is where your team defends their goal, this is one end zone
  
• the (red) goal line which goes through the entrance of the goal
• the blue line which marks the end of the defensive zone in which your teams goal is sitting and at the same time the beginning of the neutral zone
• a (red) middle line that is just for orientation
• the next blue line which marks the end of the neutral zone and the beginning of the offensive zone, the other end zone
• again the red goal line with the opposing team’s goal/net sitting on it; here your team is going on the attack, trying to score goals
• the boards behind the goal/net

And here are the two main field types as diagrams 

- the NHL version (taken from the Wikipedia commons):

Attribution: By Completefailure based on raster file created by User: Radomil - vector version of File: NHLHockeyRink.gif, redrawn according to NHL Rule Book, CC BY-SA 3.0

- and the IIHF version (also from the Wikipedia commons):

Attribution: By Hedavid (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)

Here’s what they all have in common:

• the field is longer than it is wide, the direction of play is lengthwise
  
• there’s a middle line (red) that divides the rink in half, this line is mostly irrelevant and for orientation
• there are two other red lines at the end of the field; you can still play behind them, but they have relevance for goals and icing (both will be explained later; I’ll add the relevant links as soon as the posts are up)
• there are two blue lines that divide the field into three zones (two end zones (where the goals are: defensive zone, which means in front of your own goal and the offensive zone which is the opposing team’s defensive zone, and the neutral zone which is between the end zones)
  those two blue lines are pretty important for a lot of rules
  
• there’s a red line around an area in front of the goals filled in with blue, it’s called the crease and also important for some rules
• faceoff spots: 9 total - 2 per end zone, 5 in the neutral zone (a faceoff is the start of a play after each interruption; more later with a link here)
• boards and glass: boards are the a little above waist high boundaries of the field; most of the time they are extended in height by (plexi)glass or netting to keep flying pucks from hitting spectators - behind the goals there will oftentimes be additional netting high up for the same purpose

the differences as a quick rundown:

• the three zones are either thirds (equal size; IIHF) or the neutral zone is smaller than the end zones (NHL)
• the shape of the crease - half circle in IIHF rinks, in the NHL the half circle is reduced, it ends 1 feet outside of where the goal posts are
• the goaltender trapezoid (officially called: goaltender trap zone); the area behind the net the goaltender is allowed to play the puck in, only NHL rinks have it
• NHL rinks are a bit shorter

As you can tell from the description, I like ice hockey.
I’m also German. And as most might assume, Germany is less of a hockey nation, we’re not Canada after all. Kids here grow up playing soccer or have friends who play soccer. So many of my friends have no idea about ice hockey (for short called hockey from now on) other than “you need a black disc and sticks and skates”.

So here on this blog, I’ll explain the basic rules of hockey (and probably dive into more details and into hockey in connection with my photography).

These posts will be tagged with hockey basics - even if I go into details; as long as there’s new rules to explain, hockey basics is the tag.