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Ice hockey, referred to simply ashockey inCanada, theUnited States, and most ofEurope includingFinland,Sweden,Russia and theCzech Republic, is ateamsport played onice. It is one of the world's fastest sports, with players on skates capable of going high speeds on natural or artificial ice surfaces. Though played on sixcontinents, ice hockey, as a participatory and as aspectator sport, is most popular innations in which theclimate is sufficiently cold as to permit natural, long-term seasonal ice cover;Canada, theCzech Republic,Finland,Slovakia,Sweden,Russia, and theUnited States have dominatedinternational competition, claiming 47 of the 48gold andsilver medals awarded in themen's and women's competitions at theOlympic Winter Games.
Ice hockey is one of the fourmajor North American professional sports, represented at the highest level by theNational Hockey League. It is the officialnational winter sport of Canada, where seven of the 32 NHL franchises are based; Canadian-born players, though, outnumber American-born players in the NHL by a factor of three (30 per cent, additionally, come from outsideNorth America).
The sport is played on ahockey rink. During normal play, there are six players, five positional players and onegoaltender, per team on the ice at any time, each of whom is onice skates. The objective of the game is to scoregoals by shooting a hardvulcanizedrubber disc, thepuck, into the opponent's goal net, with the goal nets placed at opposite ends of the rink. The players may control the puck using a longstick with a blade that is commonly curved at one end. Players may also generally redirect the puck with any part of their bodies, but the kicking of the puck into the goal is prohibited.
Thehistory of the National Hockey League began with the demise of its predecessor league, theNational Hockey Association (NHA), in 1917. After unsuccessfully resolving disputes withEddie Livingstone, owner of theToronto Blueshirts, executives of the three other NHA franchises suspended the NHA, and formed theNational Hockey League (NHL), replacing the Livingstone team with a temporary team in Toronto, theArenas. The NHL's first quarter-century saw the league compete against two rival major leagues—thePacific Coast Hockey Association andWestern Canada Hockey League—for players and theStanley Cup. The NHL first expanded into the United States in 1924 with the founding of theBoston Bruins, and by 1926 consisted of ten teams inOntario,Quebec, theGreat Lakes region, and theNortheastern United States. At the same time, the NHL emerged as the only major league and the sole competitor for the Stanley Cup; in 1947, the NHL completed a deal with the Stanley Cup trustees to gain full control of the Cup. The NHL's footprint spread acrossCanada asFoster Hewitt's radio broadcasts were heard coast-to-coast starting in 1933. (more...)
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TheFinland national women's ice hockey team is the top Finnish national team. Along with Canada, United States and Sweden, the Finnish national women's team is the only one to win a medal in the Winter Olympics, winning bronze in 1998.
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