Sorry for the delay between posts. Travel, work, and school have devoured my time, and frankly the paying support is rare enough that I have been deprioritizing hockey history. To shame me into writing more, the easiest way is to subscribe.
I have to imagine no rule so obvious has had so much ink spilled over it as the icing rule. Touch, no touch, or hybrid? How hard can you play the body trying to make or beat out an icing call? Should you be able to ice the puck on the penalty kill? If your goalie is out and you ice the puck, where’s the faceoff? It has sure taken a lot of thought to get to the form we have today.
In order to be quibbled over, the rule had to be invented. That came surprisingly late in the day: before the 1937–38 season, Boston Bruins supremo Art Ross got the icing rule into the books alongside other familiar, and controversial, rules: consequences for firing the puck over the boards1, a faceoff if the goalie ties the puck up along the boards (now sadly practically obsolete), a penalty shot for a skater deliberately covering the puck near the goal, and so on. It was part of a Depression-era effort to speed up play and increase scoring, and therefore excitement, at a time when the very league was holding on for dear life.
You probably know that, and you may have heard of the infamous game in which the Bruins “iced the puck” nearly 90 times, resulting in a borderline-inevitable 0-0 tie. What you may not know is that infamous game was on January 3, 1932. Over five years passed between the nadir of the no-icing era and the first flash of what became the icing rule, and we don’t really know why.
Art Ross was an innovator. At the same time as the icing imbroglio, Ross was introducing a bevel-edged puck, one smoother than the square-edged puck that had been familiar until then. The early beveled pucks were practically trapezoidal, and the very devil to pass with, so they did not last long, but refinements continued and led to the puck shape of today. Ross had a hand in the old B-shaped net, forward-passing reforms and plenty else; he experimented with metal-shaft two-piece sticks (!), off-ice workouts (!!), and some trophy or something. If he hadn’t donated the Art Ross Trophy, they should have named the thing after him anyway, for few coaches have done so much to make hockey just better.
But the icing rule was a bit of a special case. The NHL had wanted to increase scoring for a number of years, particularly since the 1928–29 season when George Hainsworth set what we all hope is an unbreakable record of 22 shutouts in 44 games. Games averaged fewer than three goals each. Even for connoisseurs of defensive hockey, it was a bit much, so for next season the forward pass was permitted in the attacking zone. Prior to that, you had only been able to pass forward in the defensive or neutral zones, rather like ringette today; the forward pass in the attacking zone was controversial at the time, and international hockey only adopted it much later, but it was so obviously a good idea that it became so universal we forget it ever wasn’t.
However scoring was still, by today’s standards, low. About five goals per game, depending on the season. Your average game ending 3-2 instead of 2-1 was a huge difference compared to what they were used to, but it wasn’t exactly firewagon hockey. One reason was that there was no icing rule. In fact, icing was considered a skill play: at a time when puck possession focused more on stickhandling than passing, being able to fling the vulcanized rubber out of the zone and down the ice had a recognizable art to it. The papers at the time called it “golfing the puck,” which may indicate the sophistication of the motion. But it was an art players could develop, and boy did they.
December 8, 1931, Boston Garden. Eddie Gerard and the New York Americans hold a 3-2 lead over Art Ross’s Bruins. The Americans were a lousy team, on their way to a 16-24-8 record, last in the Canadian division (don’t ask). The Bruins… were almost as bad, 15-21-12 at the end of the season, though with a positive goal difference because it was just one of those years. In a battle of cellar-dwellers the Americans had a rare road lead and weren’t about to let it go; they spent the third period icing the puck and, for a team which held so few leads worth defending, they proved equal to it. Wrote the Boston Globe, “In that feverish third period, when the New Yorkers were sorely pressed, McVeigh, Himes and [Hockey Hall of Famer Red] Dutton did some very fancy stalling. … And of all the players who shoot the puck the length of the rink to relieve pressure, nobody does it more scientifically than Dutton.”2 Dutton was better known as an executive but was a hard-nosed Hall-of-Fame-standard blueliner, big for the era, and apparently could send the puck the length of the ice like nobody’s business.
