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Jul 20

Hockey Things You Might Want To Know If You're Writing Heated Rivalry Fic and You Don't Already Know Hockey

If you do know hockey, this is not for you! You already know what you're talking about. Have fun!

This is like 5000 words long and only covers the minimum on a lot of things. Part of the goal for everyone else is to give you terms to search if you do for some godforsaken reason want more information. I hope this satisfies! If not, ask me questions!

At the time that I am posting this, only 3 episodes are out. There are some spoilers for those episodes but none for anything after that (despite the fact that I have definitely read all the books several times each).

Setup

The NHL (and the fictional MLH) is split geographically into two Conferences, the Eastern Conference and the Western Conference. The approximate dividing line is the end of the Eastern Time Zone; anything in the Central, Mountain, or Pacific time zones is in the Western Conference. (Before it was realigned in I think 2013, the Detroit Red Wings were in the Western Conference, which was weird if you know actual geography and normal if you think about population density.)

Each Conference is divided into two Divisions; in the East it’s the Metro and Atlantic, although Detroit is in the Atlantic Division, which…. Well, anyway, there are a lot of teams out there. If you’re familiar with baseball, you’ll be expecting two teams in the same city to be split into two different divisions, if nothing else, and that definitely does not happen. The Rangers and the Islanders, both in NY, are in the same division, as are the LA Kings and the Anaheim Ducks. (Yes, like the movie.)

The Western Conference, on the other hand, roughly makes geographic sense; the Central teams are, overall, east of the Pacific teams. As of me writing this, there are eight teams in each division, 16 in each conference, and 32 in the NHL total. In 2009, when Heated Rivalry starts, there were 30 teams, so the divisions were uneven.

Minor Leagues

The NHL/MLH is the best league of hockey in North America, and they do have what baseball would call a “farm system” —the AHL (American Hockey League) is the level right below, equivalent to baseball’s triple-A teams, and the ECHL (East Coast Hockey League, not limited to the east coast; long story) is the level below that. AHLers sometimes play NHL games when people on the NHL team are injured. You might hear them referred to as “call-ups.”

Anatomy of a Game

An NHL/MLH game is 60 minutes long, divided into 3 20-minute periods. In between each is an 18-minute intermission (first and second intermission), where on TV the analysts talk about what just happened, and at the actual game itself, the Zambonis (the big ice-flattening machines) run. At any given point in time, there are 12 players on the ice—6 for each team. One of them is the guy in the net, the goaltender/goalie/tendy/netminder. The other five are skaters, forwards and defensemen. (See below for “types of hockey players.”)

If, at the end of the 60 minutes (also called “regulation”), both teams have scored the same number of goals (gotten the puck into the net behind the goalie the same number of times), then the teams go to overtime. In the regular season, overtime is five minutes of 3-on-3 (plus the goalie), usually two forwards and a defenseman. If the score is still tied after 5 minutes of that, then they go to a shootout. One player grabs the puck at center ice and has one chance to shoot it behind the goalie. The team that gets more shootout goals (which don’t count for individual points; they’re in a separate category) wins the game.

During the playoffs, teams do not play 3-on-3 overtime; they play a full overtime period, which looks the same as the regular part of the game, and it keeps going until someone scores a goal (sudden death). It can go on for quite a while—recently we’ve had overtimes of 90 minutes (in 2020) and 79 minutes (2023)! The players played basically two and a half full games! It’s absurd and can definitely be exploited for narrative tension—but only in the post-season.

If the team wins a game, it gets 2 points. If the team loses a game in regulation, it gets 0 points. If the team loses a game in overtime, it gets 1 point, called the “loser point” or “pity point” or “courtesy point” (in the sense of a courtesy flush). However, overtime loss points do stack up! Just ask the Minnesota Wild this year. (International hockey and the PWHL use the 3-2-1 system, but unless you’re writing something about the Olympics or PWHL players, don’t worry about that.) The points, “team points,” determine the team’s rankings/standings, not straight win/loss. Individual players also get something they call points from scoring goals or assisting the player who scored the goal (shooting the puck to him), and these are used for awards (see below about the NHL Awards) and general bragging.

Penalties

If a player does something that is not allowed, such as using his stick to trip another player, that’s a penalty. Penalties are either minor or major penalties; minor penalties are 2 minutes long, and major penalties are 5 minutes long. The player who committed the penalty sits in the penalty box (also called the “sin bin”) for the length of the penalty, or, in the case of a minor penalty, shorter, if the other team scores during his two minutes. (For a major penalty, you’re stuck in there for the full time.) There are other penalties that can throw you out of a full game, but ask me or look up “game misconduct” or “match penalty” if you want more information. There are two penalty boxes, one per team.

The team whose player committed the penalty plays with only 4 players for the length of the penalty. They are on the “penalty kill.” The team with all its players has a “power play” (or is on the power play). It is generally easier to score a goal when you have one more player than the other team. The goal is a “power play goal,” but it’s treated identically to every other goal. If it’s a minor penalty, the scored goal means the guy in the box gets to jump out early. It could be as early as only a few seconds later!

If the team that’s down one player commits another penalty, then yes, you can have 2 people in the sin bin at once. I’ve seen something like 6-7 people in a single box, usually for a bench brawl (all the players on both teams get off the bench and start punching each other). You can also have both teams committing penalties, at the same time or at different times, but after some point they stop pulling guys out of the game. The lowest number of players on the ice after penalties is 4-3. They won’t go below that.

When there’s a simple fight and both players get only five-minute fighting majors (“five for fighting,” yes, like the band), the fighters both go into the respective boxes and wait out their five minutes, but the teams keep playing with the normal amount of players.

If the goalie commits a penalty, he does not go in the box. Another guy sits the penalty for him. Too bad!

Types of Hockey Players

Every team has 23 active players on their roster, and 20 suit up for a game: 2 goalies (one plays, one sits on the bench and does weird shit just in case the first guy gets injured), 12 forwards (4 lines of 3 each), and 6 defensemen (3 pairs of 2 each). (You can also do 11 forwards/7 defensemen, but the Wild did that a couple nights ago [Dec. 8, 2025] and it almost backfired on them, so, you know, don't. Unless it increases narrative tension.) The remaining 3 players sit in the press box in suits and cannot be tagged in to that game. (Actually, the 3rd goalie usually plays in the AHL.) If a guy gets injured other than the goalie, you just stick another guy on the team in his place.

The types of players are goalies and skaters (goalies do skate but not as much/well as everyone else). Skaters are broken up into forwards and defensemen. Forwards are further split into centers and wings; each line is one center and two wings, left and right. Defensemen are left and right defense. If you play left wing, for example, it doesn't mean you shoot left; the most famous left wing in hockey is a right shot. (Ovechkin.) Also, what way you shoot is the OPPOSITE of your handedness; if you're left-handed, you probably shoot right. About 70% of the league shoots left (is right-handed), and right-shot forwards and defensemen are prized and may stay on a team even if they suck. I mean, not forever, but longer than you'd think in some cases!

Goalies are weird. The stick is in their dominant hand, covered by a blocker (a padded glove with a flat back), and the catching glove is on their non-dominant hand. Except Vasilevskiy, who is left-handed and has the stick in his right hand, because he got used to it that way early on. There are like five or six right-catch goalies in the NHL, out of 90ish.

Players go out in lines or pairs. Forwards go out in lines of 3, and their shifts are usually 30 to 45 seconds long, but sometimes things happen and they go much longer—up to 2 minutes! Defensemen go out in pairs, and their shifts are longer than forwards, usually 45 seconds to 1 minute. So with 12 forwards, there are 4 lines that the coach can put out at any point in time, and with 6 defensemen, there are 3 pairs. Other than the starting lineup, the guys literally on the ice when the puck is dropped to start the beginning of the game, lines and pairs don’t always match up—there are uneven numbers, and sometimes they change at different times.

The average top-line forward (so, including Ilya and Shane) plays about 20 to 22 minutes per game. The top pair of defensemen play about 24-25 minutes per game. All goalies play 60 minutes per game, which is why goalies are the best hockey players. In this essay I will—

Wait, I don’t think I can do that joke at this point. Oops. Moving on!

The Annual Schedule

Camp—preseason team training—starts in early September. Guys who are definitely already on the team, no question, get to skip some amount of camp (a few days, a week) but some weirdos go to the extra days anyway. Guys who haven’t made the team yet—older players on professional tryout contracts, AHLers hoping to move up to the big club, or rookies—have to go to all of camp, so that the coaches can see things like does this player work with our system, does this player maybe need a little more seasoning in the AHL (if they’re 20 or older) or back to their junior team/college (this is complicated, please don’t ask; Shane played juniors and Ilya played in the KHL system/Superleague, which lets them turn pro at 16) if they’re under 20. Or maybe the player is 39 and trying to squeak one more year out, and the coaches have to tell them that no, they should retire.

Anyway, they start with something like 36-40 players and winnow it down to 23 by the end of camp and the six to eight preseason games. Some guys are sent back to the AHL or whatever; some are just released from their professional tryout contracts; some are signed for 2-way (AHL/NHL) contracts and mostly stashed in the AHL. Some are possibly even traded.

In between camp and the start of the preseason games, some places have Prospect Showcase games. In the Minnesota Wild's Prospect Showcase (the team I know best), they, the St. Louis Blues, and the Chicago Blackhawks have a mini tournament of 3 games over a weekend. They're mostly for the kids who are not going to make the teams, but, like, a few rookies who are going to make the team will occasionally show up. (A couple years ago it was Connor Bedard who was the Big Fucking Deal at the Tom Kurvers Prospect Showcase.) This year, the Prospect Showcase for the Wild et al was the weekend of Sept 12-14.

The normal preseason games are for the final determinations of who’s going to stay on the team, and the preliminary determinations of how various parts of the team fit together—who’s on which line, who’s paired with whom, that sort of thing. Veterans rarely travel to away preseason games, because they’re Special. The preseason games started around September 17 this year for the Wild and went until Oct 3. They are usually all in the same division.

The regular season (82 games, half home, half away) starts in early to mid-October (it was Oct 9th for the Wild this year). The teams do not play on Canadian Thanksgiving, American Thanksgiving, or Christmas Day, and they usually get a 3-4 day gap around Christmas, in case some of them actually want to go home.

The All-Star Game

In early February, the league holds an All-Star Game. One player from each team goes as an absolute minimum (NHL Hockey Operations picks the best player [or the player who isn’t injured and can go] on each team, and then fans fill out the roster or pick captains or something), and I think up to 3. How they handle the ASG changes from year to year, and where it's located always changes. They pretty much always have some sort of tournament where everyone plays; they do the most accurate shot thing with the little targets you saw in the show; they also do Hardest Shot, and it's either won by the biggest motherfucker of a defenseman you've ever seen (look up Shea Weber or Zdeno Chára) or some scrawny blond bastard who, sure, is tall, but doesn't look that strong! (Elias Pettersson the forward, #40. There's a second Elias Pettersson on the team right now, which is why I specify. There's also a third Pettersson on the same team, but his first name is Marcus.)

All teams get a bye week (no games) either right before or right after the ASG. Guys typically use this week (or both, if they're not invited to the ASG) to go somewhere sunny, like Cabo. The ones with kids might not, since it's the middle of the school year, but if you live in Edmonton, I can see why you might want to.

Playoffs

The playoffs start in April and run until mid- or late June. Half the teams in the league make the playoffs: 8 from the Eastern Conference and 8 from the Western. The top 3 teams in each division make the playoffs, plus the next two best teams (the Wild Card teams) by points in the conference, not in the division, so it could be 5 from one division and 3 from the other. The #1 team in the conference plays the #2 Wild Card team. The leader of the other division plays WC2, and then teams 2 and 3 in each division get to beat up on each other. It’s a bracket system; probably easier for you just to look than me to explain it.

There are 4 rounds. Each round is a best-of-seven series, and you have to win the first round, the conference semifinals, the conference finals, and the Stanley Cup finals to get there, meaning it takes 16 wins total (4 wins to take a round) to get the Cup. Generally speaking, if you have the highest number of points in the entire NHL, the odds of you winning the Stanley Cup are about 8 in 37, over the last 37 years. This is, as you’ve definitely noticed, not great.

When the Cup is handed over, they also give the award for MVP of the Playoffs (the Conn Smythe trophy IRL), the one award that is not given at the NHL/MLH Awards. Once you win the Cup, you get to do interviews shirtless while crushing Bud Lite and no one cares (Kucherov; look up "Party Kuch"), and a couple days later, there’s usually a Cup Parade.

Everyone on the Cup-winning team gets a Day with the Cup; this didn't start until, like, the 90s or something? (Ken Dryden didn't get one until he requested it in the early 2000s. RIP, Ken.) But they get to take the cup wherever they want and have fun with it. Some guys parade it around their old city and eat hot dogs out of it while taunting their old team (Phil Kessel). Some guys just eat cereal out of it (common). Some guys take it to their mosque, since they're the first practicing Muslim to win in the modern era (Nazem Kadri). Nick Bonino let his dog eat out of it! Class act. If you have a baby, you're definitely going to get a picture of the baby in the Cup. (Check, Please! was correct.)

The NHL/MHL Awards

In early July, the NHL puts on an awards ceremony (the MLH Awards in the show). There are a bunch of awards that are given out, but the ones that matter to you are:

Rookie of the Year (the Calder Award IRL; 99% of the time it goes to the rookie with the most points; the other 1% is goalies but I need to stress it's rarely the ones you're thinking of)

League MVP (the Hart Memorial Trophy for the guy most important to his own team; often the guy who got the most points but also recently it's just been Connor McDavid regardless of if he deserved it)

Most Gentlemanly (the Lady Byng Award, named after Lord Stanley’s wife; this almost always goes to the guy with fewest penalty minutes)

Most Goals (the Rocket Richard Trophy... this is obvious)

Most Points (the Art Ross Trophy; a goal is 1 point, and so is an assist)

Guy Who Suffered The Most But Complained The Least (the Masterson Award; usually goes to the guy who had cancer or overcame substance use disorder. Yes, a surprising number of fit, athletic guys in their 20s and 30s get cancer. Fuck cancer.)

Best Goalie (the Vezina; goes to the best goalie, usually the best win percentage but at least sort of vibes)

Rookie, MVP, Gentlemanly, Suffered, and Goalie are voted on by the Professional Hockey Writers' Association, but in most cases, it's just the guy with the most/least in the category. If you want some tension, Goals and Points are rarely the same guy, at least in the last 20 years or so.

The Draft

Late July things get fun again: the Draft! At the time that Our Boys were drafted, it was held in a giant fucking ballroom, where every team gets a big table to themselves, and like 10 people sit around the table with laptops and cell phones and shit happens. All the players expected to go in the 1st round are invited, plus like half of the second round just in case, and the draft order is roughly the opposite of how bad you were last year. So Montreal and Boston? Sucked ass when they drafted Shane and Ilya. It's also not uncommon for a team to continue sucking for a while and end up with a pile of #1 draft picks; for a completely random example, the Penguins had the #1 overall in 2003 (Fleury), #2 in 2004 (Malkin), #1 in 2005 (Crosby), and #2 in 2006 (Jordan Staal). Also there are sometimes fun trades at the draft itself! Check out the Luongo trade from 2006 for inspiration.

(For the record, good players do come out of the later rounds, and draft busts are a known thing. For example, the sixth-best goalie of all time by wins and first by fashion sense, Henrik Lundqvist, was drafted in the seventh round. 205th overall! 204 people passed on him [well okay the same 30 people several times]!!! Also if you want an example of a #1 overall draft bust, try Nail Yakupov.)

The last couple years, the draft has been done with each team in their own area but all the draftees in a ballroom, with video conferencing and stuff. It’s anticlimactic, comparatively.

It’s also not entirely uncommon for the teams to get someone fancy to announce their draft pick. Recently, the draft was held in Las Vegas, and Montreal got Celine Dion (who was in residency in Vegas) to announce their draft pick. More commonly, they’ll get their last famous guy to pick someone new. If Montreal started to suck after Shane retired, they might ask him to come back to announce the pick for their new #2 overall superstar.

Summer Training and Food

Over the summer, hockey players usually take about a month off (this is not an exact number) and then start training for the next season. Often they go see a Guy (Crosby's is Andy O'Brien; McDavid and some others go to Scary Gary) and he runs them through a routine. Guys do usually train in packs, partly because they're friends and partly because they live in the same cities. This is, I think, primarily off-ice training, but they can do some stuff on the ice, too. Part of the point of this training is to bulk up as much as they can, because you lose 10-20 lbs (maybe more) over the course of the season.

Hockey is a lot of fucking work. Even the guys who are constantly going on about their macros eat a fuckton of calories a day, and they still lose weight. However much you have them eating? Probably add some. In the real world, Scott would absolutely not be drinking a smoothie without protein powder added.

Also in the real world, most hockey players don't always have visible six-packs. Shirtless pictures of hockey players are easy to come by; they love posting pictures of themselves in bathing suits, and for good reason! They are all very fit! But they're not bodybuilders; it's functional. The places they're going to be overdeveloped are their forearms, their thighs, and their butts. (The show did a pretty good job of this.) They also cannot let themselves get dehydrated enough to "pop." If you want to see some actual real live naked hockey players, the ESPN Body Issue featured a few over the years: Tyler Seguin is popular (look him up, you'll see why), but you can also find Martin St. Louis, Zdeno Chára, Brent Burns, and a few others. I wouldn't be surprised if Scott or Ilya did a spread in-universe, but I think it stopped around 2015/2016.

Uniforms

I recommend finding a good video to show you everything hockey players wear if you can, but the short answer is: UnderArmor (or similar), chest protector, shoulder pads, elbow pads, jersey on top, and compression shorts, breezers/hockey pants (they're breezers if you're from Minnesota and hockey pants everywhere else) that come with padding/protectors, cup (two if you're a goalie), shin protectors, hockey garters, hockey socks, sock-socks sometimes, and skates on the bottom. Some guys don't wear UnderArmor—look up interviews with Jake Middleton if you're bored. He came out with a shirt on for an interview recently and we were all worried.

All players after 2013 (with a few rare exceptions) have worn visors on their helmets, the clear plastic covering their eyes. A few guys have ear coverings on their helmets; Crosby does. Guys are supposed to wear mouthguards so they lose fewer teeth, but if you see a mouthguard in a game, it’s probably because a guy is chewing on it. (Matthew Tkachuk is a serial offender.)

Also, hockey jerseys all have a little strap (called the “fight strap”) on the back that attaches to their shorts, so it can't get pulled off (or, more relevantly, over their head) in a fight. Sometimes it malfunctions. (See: https://www.nbcsports.com/nhl/news/video-wayne-simmonds-finishes-fight-with-kevin-bieksa-completely-shirtless For the record, the guy he fought is now a TV commentator in Canada.)

Goalie pads are special. I can’t explain them, sorry. There’s probably a video out there for them, too. Their masks (which cover their whole faces, with bars over their eyes so they can see) are often designed by local tattoo artists and can be extremely cool!

Contracts

Contracts in hockey are complicated, again! So you come into the league at whatever age (under 25, usually) and you first sign an entry-level contract, which is always 3 years long and has a maximum contract value (just a bit under $1M—minimum is always the league minimum, which is currently $775,000). When that ends, you’re a restricted free agent (RFA), which means that your team gets first dibs on you, but if they decide not to re-sign you, then you become an unrestricted free agent (UFA) and can go anywhere. (It’s more complicated than this. Google “offer sheet Holloway” if you want to know.) Your next contract, unless you’re Shane or Ilya, is usually a short one (a “bridge contract”) to get you to age 25, when under the modern (post-2013) rules, you’re allowed to get a contract that has no-trade provisions. (Some possibilities are a list of teams you won’t be traded to, something like 10 or 14 teams long; some are no trades at all [no trade clause; you can still be waived, which I’ll talk about in a second]; some are full no-movement clauses, no trades or waivers.)

(A waiver is where they put your contract up to be claimed by someone else if you want; if you clear waivers, as in don’t get claimed in 24/48 hours, you can be assigned to the AHL. OR they can put you on waivers for contract termination, which sometimes happens for okay reasons—guy desperately wants to go home and play in the KHL or something—but is most likely because the guy did something shitty and they just want to get rid of his ass.)

Scott Hunter, for example, probably signed his first big-boy contract prior to 2013, I think, since he’s a few years older than Ilya and Shane (I think 3 in canon, but……… yeah), and that means he could have signed a 13-year contract, which is frankly absurd. When the 2013 CBA (collective bargaining agreement; hockey players are unionized but they don’t call it a union because of snobbery) was signed, contracts were limited to 8 years, and teams were allowed to buy out guys with contracts longer than 8 years if something blah blah you don’t need to know this go look up Danny Brière if you’re actually interested.

If a team wants to re-sign a player at the end of the contract, they are allowed to start negotiating with a player a full year before the contract ends. Other teams are not allowed to approach the player directly until after the contract officially ends (July 1, usually), but what usually happens is that if the player doesn’t want to sign with the team, or the team doesn’t actually want to sign the player, they trade the player before the end of the contract, which gives the other team the right to negotiate with the player either immediately (if it’s less than a year to the end) or right on July 1.

The current salary max for an individual player is I think $19 million. No one is making that; the most anyone currently makes is around $15M, and Kirill Kaprizov will make $17.6M starting next year. If your question is how much are Shane and Ilya making, probably $9-10M, based on, you know, what similar players were making at the time.

I have more to say about this, but I can't do it without spoilers for episodes that haven't happened yet, so maybe there will be an update in a few weeks.

More?

I have like. So much more knowledge, like, defensive structures, specifics about the power play and penalty kill, line structure, different kinds of players, hockey fights (I have a whole PowerPoint for this but it's not available until after the first of the year), why refs suck (they do, just accept this), suspensions, different kinds of hits, why the vast majority of coaches are old enforcers/4th-liners, why the PWHL is the superior league (JAILBREAK GOALS Y'ALL and also the 3-2-1 points system is inherently better), and the Olympics/Olympic break, but . . . This is much too long, anyway.

"Stephanie, how do you know all this?" I watch a LOT of hockey. Like. So much. I'm the jackass reading hockey romance and complaining about mistakes to my friends. (Functionally none in RR, for the record. A few quibbles, like the fact that after the 2013 CBA, basically no one has road roomies, but whatever.)

Anyway. Ask questions! Please. Or watch videos for hockey newbies! Or ask a million other people—I’m just some rando.

Also thanks to sunlight, beautifulduckweed, vinia, and PerfectlySteadfast for suggesting things that I failed to explain that seem perfectly straightforward to me! Like . . . how many players are on the ice at once.

sconesforjustice

Update: a slightly more accurate version is on AO3 now. Here you go!

#heated rivalry fic resources

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