Hockey originates from the North American continent and is played in Canada, the United States and several European countries. The game was first known as “Hockey” in Canada, because it was played on the streets and in small arenas before it was formally introduced. The first hockey players were French Canadians who played the game with wooden sticks. In the United States, it was called Association hockey or “American hockey”. Eventually hockey became a team sport played between teams rather than between the two teams playing with the individual players.
The first professional game of hockey was played in the National Hockey League (NHL) in the United States in the first season (icans didn’t start to play international hockey until after World War II). Today the NHL is the top professional league in the world with eight teams in its Western Conference and the Eastern Conference. There are four different conferences with six teams in each. There are two divisions within the league; the Eastern and the Western Conferences.
The earliest known ice hockey team in the US was created in Hershey, Pennsylvania in 1917. This team was an accident of sorts, when George Bartley, a player with the Ottawa Indians hockey team, brought the same sticks and balls with which he played with the Indians. He and his friends would throw these supplies together and had a pick on the balls whenever they played ball games. They used the sticks and balls they brought from home and began playing at the local park.
Later George went to play in the Canadian Professional Hockey League (CPHL) and played for the Ottawa Senators and the Toronto Maple Leafs. He was traded to the Boston Bruins later in the season but left to sign a pro contract with the Hershey Bears in the United States. He signed a three year contract with the New York Americans of the National Hockey League (NHL) and played there for the next six seasons. Finally in his career he played two more years with the Ottawa Senators, the Chicago Black Hawks and the Colorado Rockies, before joining the Chicago Flames as a free agent.
In addition to George, there is another player from Canada who is related to hockey in Canada by blood – Brian Claine. Brian was born in Scotland but was raised in Canada and is the son of a Canadian hockey player. He played college hockey at the University of Michigan before being selected by the Boston Bruins in the second round (seventh) of the NHL Entry Draft of the NHL.
Claine is one of only three players from Canada who have won the Stanley Cup (the other two are Bobby Orr and Raphael Del Bosch), and he is one of just two players ever to win the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most Valuable Player (MVP) in the Stanley Cup/ Norris Trophy/ Presidents’ Trophy. He has also set many records, all of them well worth some mention. Among those that can be highlighted are the record ten Olympic Gold medals (out of twelve), the record five-straight decades in which a player was the top point-scorer in the National Hockey League (shared by Wayne Gretzky and Steve Yzerman), the record six-straight seasons with at least forty goals (a feat that Hall-Of-Fame candidates Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky could not accomplish), and the record seven-straight seasons in which at least thirty goals were scored by players considered “playmakers”. Claine currently has six seasons of ten or more goals, tied for the most in the history of the NHL, and he is widely considered to be one of the best “playmakers” in the league today.