The Game

by Ken Dryden

Yet it was out of this slow and static style that the priority skills of our game emerged, and in many ways have never changed. Offensively, it was skating and stickhandling; defensively, bodychecking. Bodychecking had not been a feature of the original game, but made its appearance soon after. I have found no explanation for it, yet using other circumstantial evidence, a reasonable hypothesis emerges. It had to do with an often small ice surface (though the Victoria Rink was of contemporary North American dimensions, 200 feet by 85 feet, many early rinks were a curling-size; 112 feet by 58 feet), cluttered with eighteen players, then fourteen, many of them out-of-season rugby players used to body contact, their hockey skills new and primitive, their equipment clumsy; the unavoidable result would be frequent if inadvertent collisions. But, inadvertent or not, early players soon discovered that in a puck carrier’s game, collisions were effective deterrents. So from accidents emerged our basic defensive strategy. As for skating and stickhandling, with no forward pass there was no other way to advance the puck. Skating was the fundamental skill, of course, but speed (which itself might take a player around or between opponents) was not yet a consistent tactic. Instead, it was by stickhandling that scoring chances were earned.