2008 NHL Hockey

The 2008-2009 NHL season doesn’t start until September, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any action going on – the off-season is when key trades are made, coaches are fired and hired, and many teams seal their fate, for better or for worse. The season will begin with at least 3 new, untested head coaches: John Anderson for the Atlanta Thrashers, Peter DeBoer for the Florida Panthers and Todd McLellan for the San Jose Sharks. Though the season hasn’t yet begun, ESPN.com already has rankings out, and it’s no surprise that last season’s Stanley Cup winners the Detroit Red Wings and last season’s Eastern Conference champs the Pittsburgh Penguins come out on top, followed by the Montreal Canadiens, San Jose Sharks, Philadelphia Flyers and Dallas Stars.

Will the Red Wings be able to pull off a repeat performance at the 2009 Stanley Cup? Will the Penguins dominate the 2008-2009 season? Or will an underdog team, like the Atlanta Thrashers or Los Angeles Kings, surprise everyone with a winning season? The best way to find out is to see the games live, and on Coast to Coast you’re always just a call or click away from front row seats to your favorite game.

Until the mid-1980s it was generally accepted that ice hockey derived from English field hockey and Indian lacrosse and was spread throughout Canada by British soldiers in the mid-1800s. Research then turned up mention of a hockeylike game, played in the early 1800s in Nova Scotia by the Micmac Indians, which appeared to have been heavily influenced by the Irish game of hurling; it included the use of a "hurley" (stick) and a square wooden block instead of a ball. It was probably fundamentally this game that spread throughout Canada via Scottish and Irish immigrants and the British army.

The players adopted elements of field hockey, such as the "bully" (later the face-off) and "shinning" (hitting one's opponent on the shins with the stick or playing with the stick on one "shin" or side); this evolved into an informal ice game later known as shinny or shinty. The name hockey--as the organized game came to be known--has been attributed to the French word hoquet (shepherd's stick). The term rink, referring to the designated area of play, was originally used in the game of curling in 18th-century Scotland. Early hockey games allowed as many as 30 players a side on the ice, and the goals were two stones, each frozen into one end of the ice.

By the 1870s, a group of college students at McGill University in Montreal were organizing games and had developed the first known set of hockey rules. In accordance with this new set of regulations, known as "McGill rules," a puck was substituted for a rubber ball, and the number of players on a team was set at nine.

In 1885, Montreal became the site for the first national hockey organization. The Amateur Hockey Association of Canada was founded and further reduced the number of players to seven. The sport's first league of four teams was formed that same year in Ontario.

Ice hockey migrated south to the United States in the 1890s. The first known hockey games took place between Johns Hopkins and Yale Universities in 1895. Although hockey was a national pastime in Canada, the United States was the first country to organize a professional league. Formed in 1903 and based in Houghton, Michigan, the Pro Hockey League included teams and players from both Canada and the U.S. The league folded three years later, and in 1910, the National Hockey League, the NHL, was formed.