Making advanced stats simple, practical, and fun for hockey fansAdvanced stats give hockey’s powerbrokers an edge, and now fans can get in on the action. Stat Shot is a fun and informative guide hockey fans can use to understand and enjoy what analytics says about team building, a player’s junior numbers, measuring faceoff success, recording save percentage, the most one-sided trades in history, and everything you ever wanted to know about shot-based metri...

With every passing season, statistical analysis is playing an ever-increasing role in how hockey is played and covered. Knowledge of the underlying numbers can help fans stretch their enjoyment of the game. Acting as an invaluable supplement to traditional analysis, Stat Shot: A Fan’s Guide to Hockey Analytics can be used to test the validity of conventional wisdom and to gain insight into what teams are doing behind the scenes — or maybe what they should be doing!Inspired by Bill ...

Every young hockey player dreams of one day playing in the NHL, of skating on a line with his hero and drinking champagne in the dressing room after winning the Stanley Cup. But kids should watch what they wish for. They may make it to the pros, like Sean Pronger, only to end up playing for sixteen teams over eleven seasons. They may end up on a team with a guy like the Great One, but skate on his line only in practice when the bona fide first-line centre has the flu. And they may end up d...

From hockey’s most prolific fighter comes a sports memoir unlike any other—passionate, funny, and candid, Shift Work chronicles Domi’s sixteen tumultuous seasons in the NHL.Making it through a single fight as an enforcer in the NHL is a sign of toughness. Making it through 333 of them is a mark of greatness. Whether it was on the ice or off it, Tie Domi was driven to be the best at his job and was gifted with an extraordinary ability to withstand pain. He ...

Sudden Death brings to life the incredible ongoing saga of the Swift Current Broncos hockey team. After a tragic game-day bus accident on December 30, 1986, left four of its star players dead, the first-year Western Hockey League team was faced with nearly insurmountable odds against not only its future success but its very survival. The heartbreaking story made headlines across North America, and the club garnered acclaim when it triumphantly rebounded and won the Canadian Hockey...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter’s heartbreaking account of the life and shocking death of the toughest man in hockey.Boy on Ice is New York Times reporter John Branch’s chronicle of Boogaard’s tragic life and death. A human story in the tradition of Friday Night Lights and The Blind Side, it’s a book that raises deep and disturbing questions about the systemic brutality of contact sports—from peewees to professionals—and damage that reaches f...

A moment in time. It’s rare for a person to remember exactly where he or she was at a single moment in time, some four decades past. It’s rarer still for an entire nation to hold a collective memory of such a moment. This kind of hardwired retention usually results from group trauma — the shock of assassination, large scale tragedy, or natural disaster. Occasionally, the event that galvanizes a population is a happy one. Such was the case when Paul Henderson scored the m...

The first full-scale biography of a legendary and award-winning NHL goalie who transformed the game.“There are a lot of very good goalies, there are even a fair number of great goalies. But there aren’t many important goalies. And Jacques Plante was an important goalie.” Ken DrydenOn and off the ice Jacques Plante was a true original; he was extremely talented, boastful, defiant, mysterious, and complex. Throughout his tumultuous career as a goalie, he played for Montreal, ...

One of North America's best-known hockey writers examines the strangest rituals and superstitions within the NHL.Why did Wayne Gretzky start every pre-game warm-up by shooting wide to the right of the net (a rather funny habit, given that he scored more goals than anyone in the game's history)? Why do many hockey players seem to believe performance is tied directly to facial hair? Why does Geoff Sanderson use a different length stick for every period? And why did Petr Klima break h...

Dropping the Gloves candidly tracks Barry Melrose's career in hockey - a road that has not changed substantially for today's aspiring players. Not many have Melrose's credentials or his breadth of experience in professional hockey. He's played and coached in Junior Hockey, the American Hockey League, and the NHL. As he says, he's been hired and fired, and had his share of disappointments and failures. He's also had successes at every level. Now an ESPN broadcaster and one of the m...

To celebrate the National Hockey League’s centennial anniversary, three of the most hilariously irreverent writers in sports media present their own selections for the "100 Greatest Players in NHL History." Read along as Dave Lozo, Sean “Down Goes Brown” McIndoe and Greg Wyshynski of Puck Daddy rank the NHL's best through a unique scoring system that's sure to spark debates – especially when it comes to where modern stars like Sidney Crosby rank. Then check out their other lists a...

Phil and Tony Esposito, Paul Henderson, Ken Dryden, Frank and Peter Mahovlich, Ron Ellis, Yvan Cournoyer, Rod Gilbert, Bobby Clarke, Guy Lapointe, Stan Mikita, Brad Park - these are some of the Team Canada heroes who struggled mightily to defeat the Soviet Union's formidable superstars. For most of September 1972, Canadians were riveted to their television screens in what became one of the most-watched events in Canadian history.At first, in Canada, the Canadians floundered so badl...