NHL Teams Research Articles

On the Length of NHL Shootouts

When NHL teams are tied after 60 minutes of regulation time and 5 minutes of sudden-death overtime, they go to a shootout to determine who gets the overtime point. Teams alternate shots until a winner is determined. The probability of observing shootouts of various lengths is calculated.

Cure That Puckish Feeling At Toronto's Shrine to Hockey

Cure That Puckish Feeling At Toronto's Shrine to Hockey

Competition and Pay for National Hockey League Players Born in Québec

Prior studies have suggested that salary discrimination may exist in the National Hockey League. In particular, it has been argued that Canadian NHL teams located outside of Québec discriminate against French Canadian players. The small number of French Canadian players along with the large number of teams located outside of English Canada, however, suggest that discrimination of this form should be observed much less frequently as players’ tenure in the league increases due to the greater likelihood of realizing unrestricted free agency. Although we find evidence that players born inQuébec suffer an earnings penalty on Canadian NHL teams located outside of Québec, it is not clear that the penalty is eliminated by free agency, which raises questions about the source of the pay gap.

Playing in the Neutral Zone: Meanings and Uses of Ice Hockey in the Canada-U.S. Borderlands, 1895–1915

The part performed by Canada in making contributions to the list of the world's amusements has been by no means slight. Lacrosse and canoeing for the warm bright days of summer, snow-shoeing and tobogganing for the crisp cold nights of winter, these make up a quartette of healthy, hearty sports, the superiors of which, in their appropriate season, any other country might safely be challenged to show. But apparently this ambitious colony not content with the laurels already won, and in the bringing of the of rink hockey to perfection would add another to her garland; for this fine game, as played in the cities to-day, is, without question, a distinctly home product. --J. Macdonald Oxley, My Strange Rescue and Other Stories of Sport and Adventure in Canada (1895). (1) Still there was a time, and I feel deeply for the man who can't remember such a time himself, when I had winged heels and, like Hermes, I flashed swift-footed over inch-thick black on the Black River for miles at a stretch, for hours at a time, day and night, by sun, by moon, and by firelight; with ankles that wearied but never gave in; with feet that chilled to numbness but never succumbed ... I was most at home in the rough-house type of skating that went with hockey, and when the puck went out of bounds, I think I never faltered (though I sometimes fell through) in following the puck over a piece of tenderloin ice of cellophane thinness, that bent with grace and broke with much embarrassment. --Charles Edward Crane (b. 1884), Winter in Vermont (1941). (2) Our puny boundaries are things That we perceive, and not that we have made. --Wordsworth, The Prelude II For historians and other scholars, the place of hockey in society as enigmatic as it undeniable. The term game has a celebratory ring for most students and fans, but in historical scholarship hockey has generally been seen as an interesting cultural problem, a lens through which other, sometimes contradictory, social and political patterns can be seen and analyzed. When hockey appears in history textbooks, for example, it fleeting and normally used to demonstrate national frailty or disunity. (3) Hockey has divided Canadians--French from English, westerners from easterners, and men from women--as much as it has brought them together. Canada's national memory peppered with moments of hockey-induced cleavage, like the 1955 Richard Riot and the triumphant regionalism of the 1920s Western Hockey League. (4) Just as problematic, hockey has been portrayed as a vehicle for continentalization, the Americanization of Canada. In the 1920s and 30s, John Herd Thompson and Allan Seager write, Canadian Hockey was revolutionized by American money. The development of the National Hockey League in the 1920s illustrated this trend clearly. Though made up almost wholly of professional players, fully six of the ten NHL teams for 1926-27 were located in American cities. Canadian sport has become more and more American, Archibald MacMechan argued in the Historical Review in 1920. Hockey, F.B. Edwards lamented in Maclean's in 1927, is Big Business now. (5) Central to these narratives the often unstated assertion that hockey was, in its origins and essence, an exclusively construct. The crises that it caused, or revealed, were at all times crises of the garden variety--regionalism, language-based rivalry, and the bugbear of American domination. According to these assessments, hockey both united and divided Canadians in distinctly ways. Told in these ways, the story of hockey fit neatly into the big boxes that historians have used to package the past--nation-building, regional disparity, multiculturalism, and anti-Americanism. As conceptually tidy as they may be, these treatments of the game's history leave only a partial impression. …

Missing the Net: The Law and Economics of Alberta's NHL Players Tax

The Province of Alberta has introduced a tax on the income of all NHL players earned in every game played in Alberta. The Alberta government intends to forward the revenues from the tax to the ownership groups of the Province's two NHL teams - the Edmonton Oilers and the Calgary Flames. Reaction to the tax has been harsh. Criticism ranges from Oilers allegations of interference with collective bargaining rights to discriminatory treatment of high profile taxpayers in violation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The NHL Players Tax is designed to take advantage of the practical application of international foreign tax credit and treaty rules to effectively transfer tax revenues from foreign coffers to the Alberta Treasury. After exploring the stated rationale and incidence of the tax, the authors conclude that Alberta's NHL Players Tax is likely to fail to achieve its objectives. Moreover, the tax represents aggressive extension of the province's tax authority with no public benefit.

Do English Canadian Hockey Teams Discriminate against French Canadian Players?

Krashinsky and Krashinsky (1997) contend that the evidence I present in my paper (Longley 1995) should not necessarily lead one to conclude that French Canadians playing for NHL teams based in English Canada suffer from salary discrimination. They point, for example, to the relatively small subsample size of French Canadians playing for teams based in English Canada (five players), and contend that my statistical results should not be viewed as being particularly strong.' They also argue that my statistical results, even if accepted, can be explained by factors other than discrimination.

Working with Professional Athletes in the Rink: The Evolution of a Nutrition Program for an NHL Team

For many professional sports, nutrition is not recognized as an important component of the team's training program. The implementation of a nutrition program for one professional hockey team has had positive results. Players who had been unable to maintain their weight during the season can now maintain their weight and be prepared for the playoffs. Others have improved their endurance with proper fluid and carbohydrate replacement. Working with the entire time--coaching staff, trainers and players--has led to the success of this program.