Hockey rules despite apparent chaos

by Tom Valentino
Staff Writer

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

Some rules are more difficult to understand than others, but they all have 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 without the puck being touched by anyone along the way.

Both the NHL and college hockey have an icing rule, but there are slight differences between the two.

"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 novice fans 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, the penalty is called and a face-off is needed.

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

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

While rules like icing and offsides are designed to affect team strategy, other rules are designed increase player safety. One such rule is the boarding penalty, which is 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 Basserab said. "It's actually a form of charging. The rule is in place for safety more than anything else.”

An NHL player gets into a fight and is sent to the penalty box. A college player gets into a fight and is sent to the showers — different consequences for the same infraction.

"Fighting is a game disqualification for us," Richardson 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.