Ice Hockey

“‘You’re not a human being, you’re a number, a product, an asset as long as you can perform. If you can’t perform, then you’re a liability and they’ll drop you.’”

Professional athletes suffer tremendous damage to their bodies over the course of their careers. Some literally lose years from their lives because of their injuries. Why do athletes sacrifice themselves? Is it the price of being a professional? Is it all for the fans, or the money? What’s clear is that the physical and emotional tolls of being a professional athlete may not be worthwhile. In Game Misconduct, Nathan Kalman-Lamb takes us into the world of professional hockey players to illustrate how money, consumerism and fandom contribute to the life-altering injuries of professional athletes.

Unlike many critical takes on professional sports, Kalman-Lamb illustrates how the harm suffered by the athlete is a necessary part of what makes professional sport a desirable commodity for the consuming fan. In an economic system — capitalism — that deprives people of meaning because of its inherent drive to turn everyone into individuals and everything into commodities, sports fandom produces a feeling of community. But there is a cost to producing this meaning and community, and it is paid through the sacrifice of the athlete’s body.

Drawing on extensive interviews with fans and former professional hockey players, Kalman-Lamb reveals the troubling dynamics and dangerous costs associated with the world of professional and semi-professional sport.

Kalman-Lamb’s book lends a very important perspective into the microcosm that is sports and what it may be saying about humanity.

— Royce White, NCAA, NBA and NBLC player

Bringing high theory to the hockey rink, Nathan Kalman-Lamb has done what few other critical sports scholars have: write a book that is both scholarly rigorous and accessible to the everyday sports fan. Game Misconduct shines the flood lights on the dark corners of the sports industry. Is another world of sports possible, one free of exploitation, alienation, and the sacrifice of athletic bodies? Read this book and find out for yourself.

— Simon Black, former NCAA athlete and sports columnist for Canadian Dimension magazine

At the heart of professional sports, insists Nathan Kalman-Lamb, is the sacrifice of the athletic body. Wading through a battlefield of injured players, obsessed fans, and profit-hungry owners, Game Misconduct reveals ugly secrets of the sports business. After reading this incisive analysis, none of us will ever watch a sports event in quite the same way—nor should we.

— David McNally, author of Global Slump

Kalman-Lamb’s brilliant, quite moving study of hockey, injury, and identity gives us a model for critical sports studies at their very best.

— Orin Starn, author of The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal

A path-breaking book that invites readers into radical analysis by way of the absorbing stories of professional athletes and their fans.

— Alan Sears, author of The Next New Left

Nathan Kalman-Lamb’s eloquent and well-researched book Game Misconduct has has moved the discussion of sport and social inequality to a new terrain.

— Gamal Abdel-Shehid, York University

Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, a sports and entertainment arena in Long Island, New York, encountered a public relations challenge in the 1990s. Nassau Coliseum, one of a few high-capacity venues in the New York metropolitan area, hosted the New York Islanders of the National Hockey League and concerts featuring headliners such as the Grateful Dead, New Kids on the Block, and Frank Sinatra. Nevertheless, the arena became a target for the world's first all-sports radio station, WFAN 660 AM in New York City. WFAN hosts perpetuated the image of a dreary "Nassau Mausoleum" with dim lighting, long bathroom and concession lines, and a leaky roof. By placing students in the decision-making situation that confronted the Nassau Coliseum executives, this case explores various approaches to reputation management at sports venues.

This article considers the implications of rising sports rights fees and emerging digital media technologies for legacy public service broadcasters. I argue that, while the Hockey Night in Canada sublicensing agreement with Rogers prompted a significant amount of criticism of the CBC at the time, it is consistent with the broader history of the program. Furthermore, the situation is most significant in that it exposes the tensions between the CBC and the marketplace as manifested in CBC-TV. I suggest that this deal illustrates that the CBC should exit the commercial television marketplace. I conclude by suggesting that the CBC should shift its focus toward a renewed emphasis on noncommercial programming in areas often neglected by the commercial media. This approach could potentially provide a model for how legacy public service media institutions might reassert their civic and cultural value in an increasingly convergent and commercialized mediascape.

Sports leagues consist of conferences subdivided into divisions. Teams play a number of games within their divisions and fewer games against teams in different divisions and conferences. Usually, a league structure re-mains stable from one season to the next. However, structures change when growth or contraction occurs, and realignment of the four major professional sports leagues in North America has occurred more than twenty-five times since 1967. In this paper, we describe a method for realigning sports leagues that is flexible, adaptive, and that enables construction of schedules that min-imize travel while satisfying other criteria. We do not build schedules; we develop league structures which support the subsequent construction of ef-ficient schedules. Our initial focus is the NHL, which has an urgent need for realignment following the recent move of the Atlanta Thrashers to Win-nipeg, but our methods can be adapted to virtually any situation. We exam-ine a variety of scenario...

Sürekli değişim ve gelişim gösteren spor, teknolojinin gelişimi, bilimin ilerlemesi ve spora olan ilginin artması ile evrensel olma özelliğini pekiştirmiştir. Bu süreçten diğer spor branşları gibi buz hokeyi de etkilenmiştir. Değişim sürecinin ana kaynağında sporcu sağlığı, izleyici kitlesinin arttırılması ve pazarlama gibi kavramlar ön plana çıkmaktadır. 19. yüzyılın başlarında ortaya çıkan buz hokeyi sporu, birçok ülkenin katılımıyla evrenselliğini dünyaya yaymıştır. Uluslararası alanda Dünya Şampiyonası ve Kış Olimpiyatları düzeyinde olimpik bir branş olması nedeniyle birçok ülkede, diğer spor branşlarına göre daha fazla oyuncu ve izleyici kitlesine sahiptir. Bu çalışmanın amacı, buz hokeyi sporunun uluslararası alanda tarihsel sürecinin incelenmesidir. Araştırmada, genel tarama ve dokümantasyon metodu ile veriler elde edilmiştir. Literatürde buz hokeyi, Dünyanın en hızlı ve sert takım sporlarından biri olarak ifade edilmiş, buz üzerinde 5 oyuncu 1 kalecinin olduğu, oyunun amacı;...

The National Hockey League (NHL) is adding a team in Las Vegas, Nevada and understanding the development of fan identity in similar markets can aid in this expansion process. Las Vegas is located in the Sunbelt, which is a geographic region of the United States that is generally considered to stretch across the Southeastern and Southwestern U.S., currently home to nine NHL franchises. This study is exploratory qualitative research that used a case study method to gain familiarity with the phenomenon of NHL fandom in the Sunbelt region. Results from this research discover the key trends and patterns that influenced individuals to become fans of NHL teams in the Sunbelt region. A model of fandom was developed that suggests current fans are the driving factor of the league's growth. This research provides practical implications for NHL teams in the Sunbelt to build and expand their fan base, as well as lead to a quantitative investigation to narrow in on specific factors and differences among regions in future research.

In Slovenia as an independent state after the disintegration of Yugoslavia (1991) ice hockey is one of the traditional team sports with successes at the international level and qualifications for the Olympics (Sochi 2014, Pyeongchang 2018). The development of ice hockey is closely connected with the activities of the Ilirija Sport Club, organised as football club in 1911 which kept operating until 1945. After WWI in Iliria expand sport activities with winter sports and within them with ice hockey. In paper we follow the organistaion of ice hoceky in Iliria and Slovenia and briefly stress also the period of development till 1941.

Hockey players from the National Hockey League (N.H.L.), the Western Hockey League (W.H.L.), and Ontario Hockey League (O.H.L.) were categorized according to their month of birth. The results revealed an extremely strong linear relationship between the month of birth (from January to December) and the proportion of players in the leagues studied. That is, the number of players on the rosters with January birthdates was the highest, followed by a steady decline throughout remainder of the year. These observations are interpreted as another example of the "relative age effects". The results are considered in light of the view that a number of potentially talented hockey players are not achieving the level of performance that would accurately reflect their ability.

Relative age effects (RAEs) occur when those who are relatively older for their age group are more likely to succeed. RAEs occur reliably in some educational and athletic contexts, yet the causal mechanisms remain unclear. Here we provide the first direct test of one mechanism, selection bias, which can be defined as evaluators granting fewer opportunities to relatively younger individuals than is warranted by their latent ability. Because RAEs are well-established in hockey, we analyzed National Hockey League (NHL) drafts from 1980 to 2006. Compared to those born in the first quarter (i.e., January–March), those born in the third and fourth quarters were drafted more than 40 slots later than their productivity warranted, and they were roughly twice as likely to reach career benchmarks, such as 400 games played or 200 points scored. This selection bias in drafting did not decrease over time, apparently continues to occur, and reduces the playing opportunities of relatively younger players. This bias is remarkable because it is exhibited by professional decision makers evaluating adults in a context where RAEs have been widely publicized. Thus, selection bias based on relative age may be pervasive.

This article uses a case-study approach to develop an understanding of how framing on game telecasts can increase the brand equity of sports venues. In 2014, ESPN ranked the NHL’s New York Islanders last in “stadium experience” among all 122 teams in the 4 major North American sports leagues. Given the Islanders’ looming relocation, the 2014–15 NHL season afforded the last opportunity to consider how telecasts would portray the team’s arena, Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum on Long Island. Based on a textual analysis of Islanders telecasts, 2 frames emerged: atmosphere (loud cheering and tributes to veterans) and nostalgia (famous moments and players from the arena’s history). Teams that play in poorly regarded venues can encourage broadcasters to employ frames such as atmosphere and nostalgia to increase attendance and sales of venue-related merchandise.

Sürekli değişim ve gelişim gösteren spor, teknolojinin gelişimi, bilimin ilerlemesi ve spora olan ilginin artması ile evrensel olma özelliğini pekiştirmiştir. Bu süreçten diğer spor branşları gibi buz hokeyi de etkilenmiştir. Değişim sürecinin ana kaynağında sporcu sağlığı, izleyici kitlesinin arttırılması ve pazarlama gibi kavramlar ön plana çıkmaktadır. 19. yüzyılın başlarında ortaya çıkan buz hokeyi sporu, birçok ülkenin katılımıyla evrenselliğini dünyaya yaymıştır. Uluslararası alanda Dünya Şampiyonası ve Kış Olimpiyatları düzeyinde olimpik bir branş olması nedeniyle birçok ülkede, diğer spor branşlarına göre daha fazla oyuncu ve izleyici kitlesine sahiptir. Bu çalışmanın amacı, buz hokeyi sporunun uluslararası alanda tarihsel sürecinin incelenmesidir. Araştırmada, genel tarama ve dokümantasyon metodu ile veriler elde edilmiştir. Literatürde buz hokeyi, Dünyanın en hızlı ve sert takım sporlarından biri olarak ifade edilmiş, buz üzerinde 5 oyuncu 1 kalecinin olduğu, oyunun amacı; oyun topu olarak adlandırılan pak’ı teknik ve taktik anlamda üstünlük kurarak oyun kuralları dahilinde gol ile sonuçlandırmak olarak ifade edilmiştir. Ülkemizde buz hokeyi sporu ile ilgili çok sayıda bilimsel çalışma bulunmazken, uluslararası alanda branşın birçok yönü derinlemesine ele alınarak işlenmiştir. Sonuç olarak, tarihsel süreç içerisinde sporcu malzemeleri, tesis alt yapı bilgileri, teşkilatlanma süreçleri değerlendirilmiştir. Ulusal ve uluslararası organizasyonlar ile sporun gelişimine destek sağlandığı, buz hokeyi sporunun tüm yaş gruplarını kapsayacak şekilde branşa olan ilginin arttığı ve giderek dünya geneline yayıldığı görülmüştür.


The ever-changing and evolving sport has changed its nature of being universal through technological developments, the advancement of science and the increasing interest in sports. Like other sports, ice hockey has been affected by this process. The main sources of this change process are the concepts like athletes’ health, increasing the audience, and marketing. Ice hockey, which emerged at the beginning of the 19th century, has spread its universality to the world with the participation of many countries. As ice hockey is an Olympic branch at the level of World Championships and Winter Olympics at the international level, it has more numbers of players and audience in many countries than other sports branches. The objective of this study is to examine the historical process of ice hockey in the international area. In the research, the data were obtained via general screening and documentation method. Ice hockey has been described as one of the fastest and hardest team sports in the world and it has been specified as a sport which aims to finalize the game through having a technical and tactical advantage by 5 players and 1 goalkeeper on the ice through scoring a goal with puck, the game ball. While there are not many scientific studies in our country, many aspects of the branch have been scrutinized in the international field. As a result, athlete materials, facility infrastructure information, and organization processes were evaluated during the historical process. It has been revealed that ice hockey has been supported by national and international organizations, there has been an increasing interest from all age groups to the branch, and that it has been spreading throughout the world.

Recent media coverage and peer-reviewed research has called attention to Canadian minor
hockey, highlighting problematic parent behaviours. The purpose of this study was to explore
negative parental behaviour in Canadian minor hockey through the perspectives of 10 hockey
insiders. Results revealed negative parent behaviours related to stakeholder abuse, excessive
investments and rewards, over-stepping coaching lines, and encouragement of aggression.
Participants provided insight into the motives behind these behaviours including the lure of
professional sport, the hockey hierarchy, parents’ return on hockey investments, and living
vicariously through one’s children. Participants also proposed potential solutions to prevent and
manage these issues including effective parent education programs with targeted curricular
content, and stronger systems for reporting and discipline. Findings are discussed through the
lens of the what, why, and how of negative parental behaviours in youth sport, and
contextualized within the current changing climate of minor hockey in Canada.

Traditional visual search experiments, where the researcher pre-selects video-based scenes for the participant to respond to, shows that elite players make more efficient decisions than
non-elites, but disagree on how they temporally regulate their gaze. Using the vision-in-action [J.N. Vickers, J. Exp. Psychol.: Human Percept. Perform. 22 (1996) 342] approach, we tested
whether the significant gaze that differentiates elite and non-elite athletes occurred either: early in the task and was of more rapid duration [A.M. Williams et al., Res. Quart. Exer. Sport 65
(1994) 127; A.M. Williams and K. Davids, Res. Quart. Exer. Sport 69 (1998) 111], or late in the task and was of longer duration [W. Helsen, J.M. Pauwels, A cognitive approach to visual search in sport, in: D. Brogan, K. Carr (Eds.), Visual Search, vol. II, Taylor and Francis, London, 1992], or whether a more complex gaze control strategy was used that consisted of both early and rapid fixations followed by a late fixation of long duration prior to the final execution. We tested this using a live defensive zone task in ice hockey. Results indicated that athletes temporally regulated their gaze using two different gaze control strategies. First, fixation/tracking (F/T) gaze early in the trial were significantly shorter than the final F/T and confirmed that the elite group fixated the tactical locations more rapidly than the non-elite on successful plays. And secondly, the final F/T prior to critical movement initiation (i.e. F/T-1) was significantly longer for both groups, averaging 30% of the final part of the phase and occurred as the athletes isolated a single object or location to end the play. The results imply that expertise in defensive tactics is defined by a cascade of F/T, which began with the athletes fixating or tracking specific locations for short durations at the beginning of the play, and concluded with a final gaze of long duration to a relatively stable target at the end. The results are discussed within the context of gaze research in open and closed skills, as well as theoretical models of long-term memory and decision making in sport.

Building on Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage theories, this paper offers an ethnography of work focused on a professional ice hockey team in Finland, where hockey is the leading sport in terms of popularity and economic investment. It is an analysis of the everyday investments in developing individual players' skills and in building teams capable of high levels of cooperation under conditions of unpredictability. By looking at team formation as an emergent set of practices, materialities, discourses, and affects, we are better able to account for how corporations of this kind mitigate the deterritorializing effects of player mobility through processes of reterritorialization. As such, the analysis offers insights into modalities of value creation in a corporate model that relies not only on the constant improvement of worker performance in ways that can be easily measured but also on intangible facets of worker collaboration that manifest as collective desire.

In February 1998, the entire Czech Republic was in jubilation over the gold medal victory of its ice-hockey team at the Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan. The players were spectacularly welcomed home by tens of thousands of fans, including ordinary citizens and political figures. Goalkeeper Dominik Hašek, the famous NHL star Jaro-mír Jágr, and team captain Vladimír Růžička, were heavily covered by the media. The three athletes went on to have successful careers after Nagano. Czech media coverage played a significant role in the "Naganomania" of the time and was later also to assist in the social fall of some of those heroes. Based on the theory of myths in sports journalism , the concept of fallen heroes, and the media frame analysis, this paper presents the development within the media coverage of the four above-mentioned athletes in selected Czech dailies. The media portrayals of these athletes so similarly celebrated in 1998 are shown to have diversely evolved over a twenty year span.

In this article, I examine the ways sport fans construct and circulate discourses of race and masculinity in cyberspace. I do this through an examination of a set of Internet memes that juxtapose the bodies of National Hockey League players with National Basketball Association players in one single image. I argue these memes celebrate White masculinity, while at the same time constructing African American athletes as individualistic, selfish, and unwilling to sacrifice their bodies for the greater good of the team. More so, I argue that these memes construct a form of racial ideology that is representative of White backlash politics.

İlk defa 2019 Aralık ayında Çin'in Wuhan kentinde ortaya çıkan koronavirüs (COVID-19) salgını tüm dünyada etkisini göstermeye başlamıştır. Dünya Sağlık Örgütünün (WHO) talimatları ve direktifleri doğrultusunda sorunun çözümü için ülkeler ile iş birliği içerisine girilmiştir. İş birliği sadece sağlık boyutunda değil eğitim, ekonomi, turizm ve spor gibi birçok alanda etkisini göstermiştir. Salgının önlenmesi ve tedbirlerin daha sıkı gerçekleşmesi amacıyla ulusal ve uluslararası spor organizas-yonlarında alınan birtakım önlemler buz hokeyi sporunu da etkilemiştir. Uluslararası Buz Hokeyi Federasyonu, ulusal ve yerel yönetimler COVID-19 pandemisinin etkisini azaltmak amacıyla spor faaliyetlerinin yürütülmesinde çalışmalar yapmıştır. Bu çalışmada, COVID-19 pandemisinin buz ho-keyi sporuna etkisi ve spor ile sağlık arasındaki ilişkinin açıklanması amaçlanmıştır. Araştırmada, genel tarama ve dokümantasyon metodu ile veriler elde edilmiştir. Pandemi sürecinde Olimpiyatlar, Dünya Şampiyonları, Kupa karşılaşmaları, ulusal ve yerel birçok spor organizasyonu etkilenmiştir. Sonuç olarak, virüs nedeniyle Dünya'da Aralık 2019'dan itibaren birçok spor etkinliğini ertelenmiş veya iptal edilmiştir. Bu durumun temel nedeninin, insan sağlığı ve çözüm odaklı kazanımlar olduğu görülmüştür.

The coronavirus (Covid-19) epidemic that firstly occurred in Wuhan, China in December 2019 began to show its effect all over the world. In line with the instructions and directives of the World Health Organization (WHO), cooperation has been made with the countries to solve the problem. Coop- eration has acted not only in health aspect but also in many fields such as education, economy, tourism and sports. In order for preventing the epidemic and make the measures more stringent, a number of measures taken at national and international sports organizations have also affected ice hockey. The International Ice Hockey Federation, national and local governments have worked on the conduct of sports activities to reduce the impact of Covid-19 pandemics. In this study, the ob- jective is to explain the effect of Covid-19 pandemic on ice hockey sports and it’s relation between sports and health. In the research, data has been obtained by general survey and documenta- tion method. In the pandemic process, Olympics, World Champions, Cup matches, many national and local sports organizations have been affected. Consequently, many sports events have been postponed or cancelled since December 2019 due to the virus. It has been observed that the main reason for this situation is solution-oriented achievements and human health.

Для Китая хоккей продолжает оставаться экзотикой. Тем не менее, благодаря развитию партнёрских отношений с Россией и стереотипным представлениям о перспективности китайского рынка, с 2016 года в одной из главных профессиональных лиг мира – Континентальной хоккейной лиге – выступает команда из Пекина. За три сезона она не снискала успехов ни в спортивной, ни в коммерческой составляющей. Логика существования и развития команды находится в зависимости от политического и конъюнктурного расчёта, и проект может быть безболезненно свёрнут в любой момент. Становление профессионального хоккея в КНР с перспективой интеграции в постсоветские лиги могло пойти по другому сценарию, если бы ставка была сделана не на искусственное создание клуба в одном из столичных городов, а на развитие имеющихся традиций в одном из городов периферийного Северо-Восточного Китая.

The aim of the article is to investigate the issue
of hockey diplomacy between Canada and the
Soviet Union, which was held in 1970s. It encompassed
a series of exhibition matches in ice
hockey, which were directly aimed to improve
relations between the two states belonging to
different Cold War alliances.
In the article an attempt to verify a number
of hypotheses was made. According to the
main one, the hockey exchanges were in fact
a fusion of positive and negative sports diplomacy.
The second hypothesis states that hockey
diplomacy was at the same time an effect and
a tool of Canadian and Soviet desire to better
their bilateral relations, while according to the
last one, selection of ice hockey was adequate
concerning the diplomatic

Within the commodified world of professional ice hockey, athletes sell their bodily performances in return for a salary.  A central feature of this transaction is the very real risk of physical injury – a risk inherent within most contact sports, but particularly so within those that feature seemingly ‘violent’ confrontations between competitors, as ice hockey is widely reputed to do.  Yet within the spectacle of sport, where physicality can be constructed as playful and unserious, it is possible for the consequences of such action to be concealed behind a symbolic, ludic veneer. Within this paper we explore this process with a particular focus on ice hockey spectators, for whom notions of sport violence as in some important way ‘mimetic’ of the ‘real’ enabled their propensity to both enjoy, and find moral validation through, potentially deleterious behaviours among athletes.

In the present study we examined the fan category prototype and associations between prototypicality of a fan, normality of fan interests, and prejudice toward fan groups. Participants reported their stereotypical image of a fan, rated fan categories (i.e., sport, music, media, hobby) concerning prototypicality, normality, and societal status, and rated 40 different fan groups on prototypicality, normality, and feelings toward fans (i.e., prejudice). The results supported the notion that sport fan is the default association with the category " fan. " Ratings of specific fan groups showed a strong association between viewing fan groups as prototypical of the category fan, perceiving the fan interests as normal, and positive prejudice toward fans in those groups. Overall, the findings suggest deviation from the fan prototype is related to viewing the fan interest as abnormal, which, in turn, predicts negative prejudice toward fans.