The rules on the ice

by Tom Valentino
Staff Writer

Without rules, the world is chaos. On a smaller scale, hockey might seem like chaos to the untrained eye, although there are rules in place.

Some rules are more difficult to understand than others are, but all the regulations serve a purpose.

Two rules created with the same purpose are icing and offsides.

When a team is whistled for icing the puck, it is guilty of shooting the puck from behind the center ice line to its opponent's goal line at the end of the ice, without the puck being touched by anyone along the way.

While both the NHL and college hockey have a form of the icing rule, a slight difference exists between the two levels.

"The NHL has 'touch icing,' while we have 'no touch icing,'" Ohio club hockey coach Dan Morris said. "In the NHL, the defending team actually has to touch the puck when it crosses the goal line, so the offensive team has a chance to stop the penalty from getting called if they can get to it first."

One of the more confusing penalties to the novice fan is the offsides penalty. When a team takes the puck into the opponents' zone, the puck must cross the opponents' blue line before any players do. If the attacking team has a player in the zone already, the penalty is called and a face-off is needed.

"People would be 'cherry-picking' all the time (without the offsides rule)," forward Dan Richardson said.

Morris said that without the offsides rule, substitution patterns would have to change along with team strategy.

While rules like icing and offsides are designed to affect team strategy, other rules are designed to increase player safety. One such rule is the boarding penalty, which is actually a form of charging.

"Boarding is called when a player is a few feet away from the boards and you check him into them," forward Nick Bassarab said. "It's actually a form of charging. The rule is in place for safety more than anything else.

A player in the NHL who gets into a fight is sent to the penalty box. A player in college who gets into a fight is ejected from the game. The different consequences for the same infraction result in adjustments on the ice, Richardson said.

"Fighting is a game disqualification for us," he said. "It's only a five-minute penalty in the NHL."

The rules of hockey can be confusing to those unfamiliar with the game. Without them, however, the game would be a free-for-all on ice skates.