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As promised, here is my post of things that surprised me when I went from zero to sixty in terms of hockey knowledge.

Holy shit how does anybody ever score, ever? I used to wonder why hockey games are typically low-scoring. I do not wonder anymore. There’s no other major sport where the goal is so well-defended. In football and basketball (and baseball, if you think of it like that), there are defending players, but the goal itself is undefended. In soccer, there is a goalie, but the goal is way bigger than them. In hockey, the goal is a tiny 4 x 6 net defended by a large man wearing enormous pads who basically takes up all the space and spends his life practicing intercepting pucks. The current NHL average goalie save percentage is 91.4%. The current NHL leader is sitting on a 95% save percentage. If you score on him, you’re probably more lucky than good. Also, teams looooooove their goalies. That’s their boy. He’s the only one who’s out there the whole game (unless he gets hurt) and he’s the last line of defense. Immediately after the game is over, the whole team files by the goalie to give him a little pat or helmet bump. If the other team messes with the goalie, prepare for WRATH.

There is no such thing as “sitting on the bench” like there is in other sports. Oh, there are guys on the bench, but they ain’t staying there. Cause you see, hockey players swap out all the freaking time. It’s insane. If you’re used to other sports, and you’re not paying attention to the players’ numbers, it’s easy to miss the fact that the guys on the ice change constantly. Hockey is so strenuous that you can’t do it for full-on game speed for more than a couple of minutes at a time, a little more for defensemen. And they don’t stop play to make substitutions! They just sort of fling themselves over the boards and switch out while the puck is in play. I have not yet stopped being impressed by this. A team typically has four sets of forwards (they go out in “lines” of three, a center and two wingers) and three sets of defenseman pairs. Usually the only guy out there the whole time is the goalie. Most of the time, all 12 of the forwards are going to get comparable amounts of ice time, especially in teams that have lots of deep bench strength. If the game is a blowout, the winning coach may choose to rest his top two lines (usually his best players) and give the lower-tier guys more ice time.

There are eight million awards in hockey. There are like dozens of variations on “The [Somebody’s Name] Trophy” or “The [Somebody’s Name] Award.” They’re all for specific stuff. There’s one for the top-scoring player, one for the goalies, one for the playoff MVP, one for the best overall player voted by the players…it’s kind of intimidating. They have an awards show and everything. Like the Oscars.

Hockey rosters are not big. I was used to teams of 60-70 dudes in football. Hockey teams typically have 23ish guys on the roster, but by rules can only “dress” 20 guys per game (as in, get them in gear and ready to play). That’s four lines of forwards, three D-man pairs and two goalies. That’s not a lot of dudes.

Fifty percent of the players in the NHL are Canadian. I mean, I knew there were a lot of Canadians but I didn’t know it was THAT many. Only one-quarter are American. The other quarter are mostly Russian, Swedish, Finnish and Czech players.

There are more hockey teams than I thought there were. Currently 30, although it’s soon to be 31 with the new Las Vegas expansion team. Seven of those teams are in Canada.

The NHL All-Star Game is not just a game, it’s a whole days-long extravaganza. The players don’t just play a game. They also engage in the Skills Competition, which is like a fancy pro-athlete game show and it’s amazing. The two team captains select players to compete in stuff like Fastest Skater, Hardest Shot (that’s hardest as in force, not hardest as in most difficult), shootout, and accuracy. There’s also an anything-goes breakaway competition that’s purely judged on fan votes, so the players can do whatever they want - wear costumes, do fancy trick puck shots. There’s lot of stuff from the skills competition on YouTube, it’s fun.