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Hockey puck
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A puck is a disk used in various games serving the same functions as a ball in ball games. The best-known use of pucks is in ice hockey, a major international sport.
hockey requires a hard disk of vulcanized rubber. A standard ice hockey puck is black, 1 inch (25 mm) thick, 3 in (76 mm) in diameter, and weighs between 5.5 and 6 ounces (156–170 g); some pucks are heavier or lighter than standard (see below).
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Encyclopedia
A puck is a disk used in various games serving the same functions as a ball in ball games. The best-known use of pucks is in ice hockey, a major international sport.
In ice hockey
Ice hockey requires a hard disk of vulcanized rubber. A standard ice hockey puck is black, 1 inch (25 mm) thick, 3 in (76 mm) in diameter, and weighs between 5.5 and 6 ounces (156–170 g); some pucks are heavier or lighter than standard (see below). Pucks are often marked with silkscreened team or league logos on one or both faces.
The game evolved in Great Britain by 1820 from bandy, which is a "ball and stick on ice" game played by field hockey players who wanted to continue to train during the European winters. Early forms of ice hockey, once known as "Canadian rules bandy", used a ball rather than a puck when it first came to North America from Europe. Early players found that the rubber ball used in field hockey was far too active on the hard ice surface, so they cut off the top and bottom of the ball to form the hockey puck. It is conjectured that the puck was first used in organized play to protect spectators from the highly active ball used previously. Today, pucks are frozen a few hours before the game to further reduce bouncing during play.
The origin of the word "puck" is obscure. Despite common belief, it is evidently not connected to Shakespeare's Puck or the mythical Puck. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests the name is related to the verb "to puck" (a cognate of "poke") used in the game of hurling for striking or pushing the ball, from the Scottish Gaelic puc or the Irish poc, meaning to poke, punch or deliver a blow:
PUCK, a blow. He gave him a puck of a stick on the head. More commonly applied to a punch or blow of the horns of a cow or goat! (Ask Little Britainers!) The cow gave him a puck (or pucked him) with her horns and knocked him down.
The blow given by a hurler to the ball with his caman or hurley (stick) is always called a puck.
Also, a free shot in hurling is a free puck.
It is possible that Halifax natives, many of whom were Irish and played hurley, may have introduced the word to Canada. The first known printed reference was in Montreal, in 1876, just a year after the first indoor game was played there.
A hockey puck is also referred to colloquially as a "biscuit" in published and broadcast media.
Variations
There are several variations on the standard black, 6 oz (170 g) hockey puck. One of the most common is a blue, 4 oz (113 g) puck that is used for training younger players who are not yet able to use a standard puck. Heavier 10 oz (283 g) training pucks, typically reddish pink or reddish orange in color, are also available for players looking to develop the strength of their shots or improve their stick handling skills. Players looking to increase wrist strength often practice with steel pucks that weigh 2 lb (900 g); these pucks are not used for shooting, as they could seriously harm other players. A hollow, light-weight fluorescent orange puck is available for road or floor hockey. Other variants, some with plastic ball bearings or glides, are available for use for road or roller hockey.
The use of the Firepuck in the early 1990s was the first attempt to improve the visibility of hockey pucks as seen on television. This invention incorporated colored retro reflective materials of either embedded lens elements or prismatic reflectors laminated into recesses on the flat surfaces and the vertical edge of a standard hockey puck. Yellow was the preferred reflected color. A spotlight was required to be positioned on the TV camera and focused at the center of the viewing area.
A short demonstration tape of the MN North Stars skating with the Firepuck was shown during the period break at the 1993 National Hockey League All Star game in Montreal, Canada. The International Hockey League (IHL) pursued testing the Firepuck with its inventor, Donald Klassen. The next television viewing was the IHL All star game in Fort Wayne IN, Jan 1994, where the Firepuck was used the entire game. The IHL tested the Firepuck in two more games, and finally the East Coast Hockey League used it Jan 17, 1997 for their All Star game.
The use of the Firepuck was discontinued because:
- The slight structural change caused a greater tendency to of the puck to bounce on the ice. This made in difficult for the goaltender, resulting in increased scoring.
- The skaters objected to the use of spotlights reflecting off the ice from the camera.
- The television viewing contrast of the Firepuck was not noticeably enhanced when the entire rink was shot in the camera lens, which is the most common camera take.
The Firepuck name was branded during the 90s but has since been discontinued.
The FoxTrax "smart puck" was developed by the FOX television network when it held NHL broadcasting rights for the U.S. The puck had integrated electronics to track its position on screen; a blue streak traced the path of the puck across the ice. The streak would turn red if the puck was shot especially hard. This was an experiment in broadcasting intended to help viewers unfamiliar with hockey to better follow the game by making the puck more visible. It was ill-received by many traditional hockey fans, but appreciated by many of the more casual viewers. The system debuted with much publicity in the All Star game at the Boston Fleet Center on Jan 20, 1996. While this production had the highest ratings of any hockey game to date, the system was shelved when Fox Sports lost the NHL broadcast rights three years later.
In game play
During a game, pucks can reach speeds of or more when struck, and are potentially dangerous to players and spectators. Puck-related injuries at hockey games are not uncommon. This led to the evolution of various types of protective gear for players, most notably the goaltender mask.
The most serious incident involving a spectator took place on Mar 18, 2002, when a thirteen year old girl, Brittanie Cecil, died two days after being struck on the head by a hockey puck deflected into the crowd at a National Hockey League game between the Calgary Flames and Columbus Blue Jackets in Columbus. This is the only known incident of this type to have occurred in the history of the league. Partly as a result of this tragedy, plexiglass panels sitting atop the boards of hockey rinks to protect spectators have been supplemented with mesh nets that extend above the upper edge of the plexiglass.
"Icing the puck" is shooting the puck from the defending players' half of the playing surface (their side of the center red line) across the opposing teams goal line on either side of the goal, as a delaying tactic or a (sometimes desperate) defensive play intended to shift the momentum of play away from the offensive team. Except when the defending team is short-handed because of a penalty, it is a rule infraction that generally results in a stoppage of play to return the puck to the offending team's end of the ice for a faceoff. Since the resumption of play in the National Hockey League after the 2004–05 lockout, a team that has a player ice the puck also must keep the same players on the ice, for the ensuing faceoff, as were on the ice when the icing infraction happened.
During the 2005–06 season, a rule was implemented which penalizes any player intentionally or accidentally shooting the puck out of the rink from their team's defensive zone. The rule was intended to eliminate the contradictory nature of the previous version of the rule, which only applied to goaltenders.
Manufacture
NHL regulation pucks were not required for professional play until the 1990–91 season, but were standardized for consistent play and ease of manufacture half a century earlier, by Art Ross, in 1940. Major manufacturers of pucks exist only in Canada, Russia, the Czech Republic, the People's Republic of China, and Slovakia.
The black rubber of the puck is made up of a mix of natural rubber, antioxidants, bonding materials and other chemicals to achieve a balance of hardness and resilience. This mixture is then turned in a machine with metal rollers, where workers add extra natural rubber, and ensure that the mixing is even. Samples are then put into a machine that analyzes if the rubber will harden at the right temperature. An automated apparatus, called a pultrusion machine, extrudes the rubber into long circular logs that are 3 in (7.5 cm) in diameter and then cut into 1 in (2.5 cm) thick pieces while still soft. These pre-forms are then manually put into molds that are the exact size of a finished puck. There are up to 200 mold cavities per molding palette, capable of producing up to 5,000 pucks per week. The molds are then compressed. This compression may be done cold or with the molds heated to 300 °F (150 °C) for 18 minutes,, depending on the proprietary methods of the manufacturer. They come out hard and then are allowed to sit for 24 hours. Each puck is manually cleaned with a trimmer machine to remove excess rubber. The molding process adds a diamond cross-hatch texture around the edge of the puck for more friction between the stick and puck for better control and puck handling.
Souvenir and practice pucks are made by a similar but faster process that uses larger pre-forms, 4–5 in (10–13 cm) thick, puts them into molds automatically, and applies more pressure and heat over a shorter period of time to compress the puck into the standard size. This allows approximately twice as many pucks to be manufactured in the same time period as the more exacting production of NHL regulation pucks.
In roller hockey
Roller hockey pucks are similar to ice hockey pucks, but made from plastic and thus lighter. They have small ribs protruding from their tops and bottoms which limit contact with the surface, allowing better sliding motion and less friction.
Most commonly red, roller hockey pucks can be found in almost any color, although light, visible colors such as red, orange, yellow, pink, and green are typical.
Roller hockey pucks were created so inline hockey and street hockey players could play with a puck instead of a ball on surfaces such as hardwood, concrete, and asphalt.
In underwater hockey
An underwater hockey puck (originally but now rarely referred to as a "squid" in the United Kingdom) while essentially similar in appearance to an ice hockey puck, differs in that it has a lead core weighing approximately 3lb / 1.3-1.5 kg within a teflon, plastic or rubber coating. This makes the puck dense enough to sink in a swimming pool, though it can be lofted during passes, whilst affording some protection to the pool tiles.
A smaller and lighter version of the standard puck exists for junior competition and is approximately 1lb 12oz / 0.80-0.85 kg and of exactly similar construction to the standard puck.
Whilst there are numerous variations in colour, construction and materials, usually regional, all must conform to international regulations stipulating overall dimensions and weight. These regulations can be found within the Official Rules at
In other sports and games
The term "puck" is sometimes also applied to similar (though often smaller) gaming discs in other sports and games, including novuss, shuffleboard, table shuffleboard and air hockey.
In popular culture
- Ice hockey sticks and pucks has been used as a symbol and main motif in different commemorative coins. A recent sample was the Finnish Ice Hockey World Championships 2003 commemorative coin, minted in 2003, celebrating the event. On the reverse, three ice hockey sticks with a puck can be seen.
- The phrase "dumb as a hockey puck" is a common idiom.
- "What are you lookin' at, you hockey puck?!", became one of the stock insult phrases of comedian Don "Mr. Warmth" Rickles. Rickles voiced Mr. Potato Head in the movie Toy Story, and in an ironic twist, uses the phrase when speaking to a hockey puck character.
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