Hockey is one of the most popular sports games in the world, along with football, basketball and cricket. For obvious reasons, hockey is most popular in northern countries with a cold climate, whose teams are among the strongest in the world.
The Pittsburgh Penguins team showed the worst result in the NHL, gaining only 38 points in a season, to be the first choice in the draft as an outsider. Having gained a talented player in the team, the club-loser suddenly turned into a victor, who won the Stanley Cup for two seasons in a row. Now such a strategy would not have worked, since the first elector is determined with the help of a lottery. The goalkeeper of one of the American teams almost died when another hockey player cut a jugular vein with a skate blade during a fall. He lost a lot of blood, but the competent actions of the club physiotherapist saved his life, and after a few days he returned to the ice. American hockey player Dino Cissarelli during one of the matches hit the opponent twice with a stick, and then added a punch to his face. The court recognized this attack and sentenced the hockey player to the day of prison, as well as a large fine. Each player on the Stanley Cup can spend one day with a trophy. Some athletes take a shower with a reward, others eat popcorn from a cup, others sleep with it, and two hockey players even baptized their children in a sports trophy.
Fans of the hockey club from Detroit after each abandoned puck are thrown into the arena of frozen octopuses – a strange tradition has arisen at a time when the team needed 8 wins to get the Stanley Cup. In addition to the usual hockey, there is an underwater and even ice varieties of this game. In the first case, players must throw a puck drowning in water into the opponent’s goal, and the underwater hockey players are not equipped with scuba diving gear – they simply hold their breath. In the second version, the puck moves along the ice surface, but not from the outside, but from the inside of the reservoir. The great football goalkeeper Lev Yashin also played hockey, and played excellently – as a hockey goalkeeper, he won the USSR Cup and several other prestigious awards. Yashin was invited to the Soviet national hockey team, but he refused, deciding to devote himself to football. In the early years of modern hockey, pucks were made of wood. Moreover, the first hockey pucks were square. Almost 70% of professional hockey players lost at least one tooth in the arena.
A puck sent with a strong arm can accelerate to 193 km / h. The word hockey translated from French means “shepherd’s staff.” NHL players are allowed to take aspirin, drugs and drink alcohol. The optimal ice thickness for hockey should not exceed 10 cm. Many hockey players let go of a mustache and a beard, as they consider shaving to be a bad omen. So that the washers, which are now made of volcanic rubber, are not too springy, they are kept in the cold until the beginning of the match. The meeting between the South Korean and Thai national teams, which ended with a score of 92: 0 in favor of the Koreans, became the most productive hockey match in history. The puck flew into the Thai gates on average every 40 seconds. The first hockey mask applied goalkeeper from Japan. This happened in 1936.
