Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 2035484" data-attributes="member: 812">Ah, hockey.The first thing to learn about hockey is how to figure out where the puck is. It's small and it moves fast and it gets buried in the boards a lot, but pay attention and you'll be able to keep track of it.The basics are simple: five skaters on each team, plus a goaltender, the object being to put the puck in the opposing team's net. Play begins with a face-off, much like a basketball tip-off only looking down instead of up. Three twenty-minute periods form the game, which is only stopped for a few reasons:1. a goal is scored2. a player commits a violation that requires a penalty3. the puck goes out of bounds4. one team or the other attempts to move the puck illegally (icing and offside)After a goal is scored a face-off is held at center ice. If a penalty is called by the referee, the offending player must sit out for the next couple of minutes and his team has to play short-handed. Moving the puck illegally can consist of either shooting it from your side of the ice all the way to the far end of the opponent's ice (icing), or by having a player cross into the opponent's ice ahead of the puck (offside). In either case a face-off is held in your end.Otherwise the play continues without stopping for the period. Teams often change their skaters while play is in progress, as skating around that fast in all that gear is pretty durn tiring! So a common play is to shoot the puck deep into the opponent's end and then skate for the bench, where a relief player will jump on as you clamber off.Teams are usually organized in lines, both offensive and defensive -- usually three offensive players and two defensive at one time, though there are no formal distinctions between player roles (that is, a defensive player can do anything an offensive player can do, and vice versa).You are not allowed to use your hands to move the puck to your team-mates, though you can catch a puck in mid-air and drop it at your feet. You CAN kick the puck around, but you cannot score a goal by kicking the puck into the net (this rule was probably invented after a few goalies took some nasty slashes to the face). You ARE allowed to hit opposing players -- you can skate into them and attempt to knock them down or get them to give up the puck. There's a bunch of restrictions on how hard you can hit and what parts of your body you can hit them with and so on, but hitting is a big part of the game. You'll often hear armchair coaches shrieking "Take the body!!!" -- they mean stop trying to steal the puck and just slam the guy into the boards.It's fast, violent game and I find it tremendously exciting to watch. It displays both brute force and breathtaking grace, there's ALWAYS a potential for sudden, catastrophic reversals, it's full of real honest-to-goodness danger, and Canada OWNZ it.I realise those may not be encouraging words for a non-Canadian whose child has started playing, but um, well, there you go. Plenty of Canadian kids end up on skates chasing a puck around, and we all turned out just fine.Didn't we?<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

Verification