Hard-hitting, nonstop action (and that's just what happens off the ice).

Hockey is the fastest of all team sports―an emotional, exhilarating, and highly entertaining blend of speed, finesse, intensity, and bone-crunching physical impact. And the NHL's Nashville Predators are, in every respect, a team to watch. But the story leading up to, and through, the Predators' triumphant first season is every bit as exciting as the game itself.

"Hockey Tonk" tells of one man's dream of bringing a pro team to a city best known for its music industry. The journey from that dream to its fulfillment in an arena filled with 17,000 screaming fans is a story of vision, passion, hard work, perseverance, and commitment to long-term success. It's a story of teamwork and hard-nosed competition, both on and off the ice.

Just a few short years ago, the majority of Nashville, Tennessee, didn't know the difference between a blue line and a line dance. But now Music City has become a pro sports town, thanks to a fiercely competitive hockey team, its business-and community-minded front office, and fan support that, according to "USA Today," is second to none.

A captivating collection of short reads for hockey fans centered around the trials, tribulations and joys of growing up ice hockey. Told with wit and wisdom and contrived to verse, this engaging collection is sure to become a hockey fiction cult classic. Written to delight players young and old, parents, coaches, or anyone who has participated in, or experienced the wonderful world of youth hockey in any way. The driving force, power and pace of the fantasy hockey poetry flows through the metered verse, forming an electric undercurrent to the game as seen through the eyes of the players. The short read format lends itself to both the hockey commute and the warm room.
As the title implies, the book is divided into three sections:
Verses: presented with simplicity for youth reading enjoyment, these offerings span player attributes, attitudes and offer encouragement to young players;
Myths: Short metrical stories based on a shred of truth, but spun to yarns, most written in an easy read format.
Legends: A hat trick of pulsing hockey entertainment. My Antarctica is the initial adventure of the young hockey Goalie King to a special slumber land. He successfully lures the Buffalo Sabres to a quest for his Frozen Cup against his rollicking Penguins team. No, not those Pens from Pittsburgh... real ones, the Arctic Burrs. A sequel finds the King seeking NHL quality training by bringing his now mature Burrs to Buffalo to engage both the Sabres and the Niagara University Purple Eagles in another dream adventure. A third legend opens the door on a stick-on-stick tale of a small-town teen street hockey tournament contrived towin the local sports bar's paper replica of the Stanley Cup.

When the 2004-2005 NHL lockout was realized, Sweden, Russia, Switzerland, Finland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Germany eagerly absorbed foreigners and locals alike, as out-of-work NHLers looked to keep their game sharp and give back to the communities that taught them to play. Little did they know how much of the experience would prepare them for the new NHL. Join them on this ultimate hockey road trip through Europe in the locker rooms, on the ice and in the streets. Sit behind Jaromir Jagr's mother in Kladno. Admire the Alps with Joe Thornton and Rick Nash. Walk through a pine forest to Peter Forsberg's childhood rink. Debate with Russian police at the Dynamo arena to meet Alexander Ovechkin before he became an NHL star. And experience all the adventures of dozens of NHLers like Danny Briere, Martin St. Louis, Alexei Kovalev, Ilya Kovalchuk, Alexei Yashin, Mike Knuble, Henrik Lundqvist, Zdeno Chara, Daniel Alfredsson, Saku Koivu, Miroslav Satan, Martin Brodeur, Sergei Fedorov and Dominic Hasek. The pain of lost dreams from a canceled season may be turned aside, but these experiences will never be forgotten.

This book probably never would have been written without the owners' lockout which led to the cancelled 2004-05 season. Missing the fastest game in the world and my team, the Maple Leafs, I instead spent many cold and quiet winter nights last season wondering just who were the greatest Leaf players of all-time. What started out as a search for a method of ranking the players evolved into a need to justify the results by organizing all the biographical and statistical data into one place and this is what came out of the research. Interlacing many action segments with the facts, this is an attempt to make sports bios more entertaining and scintillating, as well as to illuminate the great moments in the history of the team. Dating back to 1927, Toronto's team has a rich history integral to that of the NHL and this epistle is a must for all hockey fans, not just fans of the Leafs. So come read about the legendary names of both the past and the present such as Johnny Bower, Busher Jackson, Dave Keon, The Big M, Ed Belfour, Bill Barilko and many, many more.

The competition for the senior hockey championship and the Herder Memorial Trophy in Newfoundland and Labrador began in 1935. This book looks at the early days of amateur competition for the coveted trophy, through its glory days of paid players and its eventual return to the grass roots level in the 1990s. It includes a listing of winning teams and players for each year.

On May 2, 1967, Montreal and Toronto faced each other in a battle for hockey supremacy. This was only teh fifth time the teams had ever played each other in the Stanley Cup finals. Toronto led the series 3-2.

But this wasn't simply a game. From the moment Foster Hewitt announced "Hello Canada and hockey fans in the United States," the game became a turning point in sports history. That night, the Leafs would win the Cup. The next season, the National Hockey League would expand to twelve teams. Players would form an association to begin collective bargaining. Hockey would become big business. The NHL of the "Original Six" would be a thing of the past.

It was "The Last Hockey Game."

Placing us in the announcers' booth, in the seats of excited fans, and in the skates of the players, Bruce McDougall scores with a spectacular account of every facet of that final fateful match. As we meet players such as Gump Worsley, Tim Horton, Terry Sawchuk, and Eddie Shack, as well as coaches, owners, and fans, "The Last Hockey Game" becomes more than a story of a game. It also becomes an elegy, a lament for an age when, for all its many problems, the game was played for the love of it.

It was the greatest hockey series ever played-and it changed the game forever Cold War evokes as never before those legendary 27 days in September 1972: a time when hockey's two worlds collided, as the perennial world champions from the Soviet Union finally tested themselves against the top professional stars of the National Hockey League. Decided only in the dying seconds of the final game in Moscow, the series captivated fans and non-fans alike with its explosive upsets and unrelenting suspense. Cold War weaves together rich period detail, illuminating anecdote and thrilling hockey action with eyewitness accounts from Paul Henderson, Vladislav Tretiak, Ken Dryden, Yvan Cournoyer, Harry Sinden and many other greats to recreate the series: its heroes and goats, its characters and prima donnas, its moments of poignancy, bravery, hilarity and shame. This book is also about a nation's magnificent obsession. Combining passion and insight with a coolly objective eye, author Roy MacSkimming shows how Canadians' identification with their hockey roots transformed eight "friendly matches" into a bitter, life-or-death struggle between the game's superpowers-and into a symbolic confrontation between hostile political systems. On the eve of the series' anniversary, Cold War artfully documents one of the great mythic dramas in the history of sport.

Kevin Nelson recorded the absurdities and outrages of the nation's basketball courts and baseball fields in several highly successful anthologies of quotations, vignettes, and insults. Now in Slap Shots, Nelson turns his ever vigilant eye and ear to the hockey arena, in a roundup of opinions as sharp as a skater's blades and as out of control as a runaway puck

"Dave has produced what every coach dreams about . . . a smarter drill book for all situations and ages " -- Roger Nielson, National Hockey League head coach for 20 years ""The Incredible Hockey Drill Book" is of great use for all coaches as well as young and older hockey players." -- Jacques Demers, National Hockey League head coach for 10 years (coached the Montreal Canadiens to the Stanley Cup championship in 1993) Properly run practices with well-executed drills are the pillars of effective coaching. In "The Incredible Hockey Drill Book," former NHL coach Dave Chambers provides more than 600 illustrated, easy-to-follow drills for both novice and experienced coaches. These drills, divided into 24 categories, are designed to teach and improve conditioning, skating, checking, offensive and defensive play, goaltending, special teams, and much more. To help implement these drills, Chambers discusses teaching and learning theories and supplies ideas for drill and practice organization. Also included are 175 motivational slogans that may be used in various coaching situations. Coaches will find "The Incredible Hockey Drill Book" an invaluable resource for coaching hockey at all levels. Dave Chambers, author of "Complete Hockey Instruction," has coached a number of championship teams at the junior, university, and international levels. In the NHL, he has worked as head coach and assistant coach with the Quebec Nordiques and the Minnesota North Stars. He teaches at York University in Toronto.

Long considered Canadian, ice hockey is in truth a worldwide phenomenon--and has been for centuries. In Hockey: A Global History, Stephen Hardy and Andrew C. Holman draw on twenty-five years of research to present THE monumental end-to-end history of the sport. Here is the story of on-ice stars and organizational visionaries, venues and classic games, the evolution of rules and advances in equipment, and the ascendance of corporations and instances of bureaucratic chicanery. Hardy and Holman chart modern hockey's "birthing" in Montreal and follow its migration from Canada south to the United States and east to Europe. The story then shifts from the sport's emergence as a nationalist battlefront to the movement of talent across international borders to the game of today, where men and women at all levels of play lace 'em up on the shinny ponds of Saskatchewan, the wide ice of the Olympics, and across the breadth of Asia. Sweeping in scope and vivid with detail, Hockey: A Global History is the saga of how the coolest game changed the world--and vice versa.

Develop explosive acceleration, speed, and agility and dominate the ice "Laura Stamm's Power Skating" presents the skating system used by thousands of the sport's top players and teams to move with maximum efficiency on the ice.

From starts and stops to turns and transitions, "Laura Stamm's Power Skating" covers all of the critical components of explosive skating. Through top-level instruction, practice drills, and coaching tips, you'll learn these skills:

-Increase on-ice acceleration.

-Improve balance while changing directions on the ice.

-Increase speed and agility to disrupt aggressive defensemen.

-Explode from a stationary position and stop more rapidly.

-Increase puck protection without sacrificing speed.

-Use speed and agility to create more scoring chances for yourself and teammates.
The great hockey players skate powerfully and are able to get in position to make the key plays. "Laura Stamm's Power Skating" will give you that explosive edge on the competition.

The NHL's New York Islanders were struggling. After winning four straight Stanley Cups in the early 1980s, the Islanders had suffered an embarrassing sweep by their geographic rivals, the New York Rangers, in the first round of the 1994 playoffs. Hoping for a new start, the Islanders swapped out their distinctive logo, which featured the letters NY and a map of Long Island, for a cartoon fisherman wearing a rain slicker and gripping a hockey stick. The new logo immediately drew comparisons to the mascot for Gorton's frozen seafood, and opposing fans taunted the team with chants of "We want fish sticks!" During a rebranding process that lasted three torturous seasons, the Islanders unveiled a new mascot, new uniforms, new players, a new coach, and a new owner, which were supposed to signal a return to championship glory. Instead, the team and its fans endured a twenty-eight-month span more humiliating than what most franchises witness over twenty-eight years. Fans beat up the new mascot in the stands. The new coach shoved and spit at players. The Islanders were sold to a supposed billionaire who promised to buy elite players; he turned out to be a con artist and was sent to prison. We Want Fish Sticks examines this era through period sources and interviews with the people who lived it.

Line changes, limited time outs, and pucks traveling 100 miles per hour-hockey is called "the fastest game on Earth" for a reason. Keeping up with this non-stop action, especially for decades on end, takes a special kind of talent. Today's NHL broadcasters capture the game in arguably the most difficult capacity in the world of sports, giving the fans a guide to the action in a way nobody else could. With careers outlasting the players, coaches, general managers, and, in some cases, the city itself, the NHL's broadcasters have more than their fair share of stories to tell. In The Voices of Hockey: Broadcasters Reflect on the Fastest Game on Earth, Kirk McKnight takes forty-two of the game's most gifted play-by-play broadcasters-including ten hall of famers-and shares their many insights, memories, and experiences. These broadcasters have witnessed all-time greats such as Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull, Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Sidney Crosby, and Alexander Ovechkin, making them the ideal voices to pay tribute to the legends of yesterday and the heroes of tomorrow. The Voices of Hockey brings the reader down to the surface of the ice to experience overtime marathons, record-setting performances, bloodied fights, intense rivalries, and the raising of the Stanley Cup, with details and inside perspectives from some of the most qualified spectators of the game. From Bob Miller's description of "The Miracle on Manchester" to John Kelly's childhood recollection of Bobby Orr's famous "flying goal," this book is truly an encapsulation of the NHL over the past fifty years. Generations of hockey fans will enjoy reliving their favorite moments and reading about those they missed in this unique and captivating view of the fastest game on Earth.

How did a small Canadian regional league come to dominate a North American continental sport? Joining the Clubs: The Business of the National Hockey League to 1945 tells the fascinating story of the game off the ice, offering a play-by-play of cooperation and competition among owners, players, arenas, and spectators that produced a major league business enterprise. Ross explores the ways in which the NHL organized itself to maintain long-term stability, deal with its labor force, and adapt its product and structure to the demands of local, regional, and international markets. He argues that sports leagues like the NHL pursued a strategy that responded both to standard commercial incentives and also to consumer demands that the product provide cultural meaning. Leagues successfully used the cartel form - an ostensibly illegal association of businesses that cooperated to monopolize the market for professional hockey - along with a focus on locally branded clubs, to manage competition and attract spectators to the sport. In addition, the NHL had another special challenge: unlike other major leagues, it was a binational league that had to sell and manage its sport in two different countries. Joining the Clubs pays close attention to these national differences, as well as to the context of a historical period characterized by war and peace, by rapid economic growth and dire recession, and by the momentous technological and social changes of the modern age.

Pond Hockey is a fiction tale of a country boy who heads to the big city to seek his fortune, only to encounter defeat. Todd then returns home to his ailing mother where he rediscovers the local pond where he played hockey in his youth. Todd comes to head the men's hockey team as they prepare for the world pond hockey championship in Canada and en route discovers how to put past failures behind him.

A true story of hockey heartbreak, tragedy, and triumph. 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 League’s prestigious Memorial Cup in 1989. Many of the surviving Broncos continued their successful hockey careers in the NHL, among them 2012 Hockey Hall of Famer Joe Sakic, Sheldon Kennedy, and Sudden Death co-author Bob Wilkie. Years later the Broncos’ tragedy-to-triumph tale was overshadowed when the team’s former coach, Graham James, was convicted of sexual assault against Sheldon Kennedy, Theoren Fleury, and Todd Holt, all of whom played for him.

During the 1980s, the geography of minor-league professional hockey changed radically, moving from its roots in the Canadian Maritime provinces, New England and the Midwestern states into the American south. In addition to cities like Dallas, Charlotte, Norfolk and Oklahoma City, which had long traditions of minor-league hockey, unlikely places such as Biloxi, Baton Rouge, Little Rock and Augusta hosted teams. Over an 18-year period, minor-league hockey was played in 72 different southern cities, and at one point there were more minor-league teams in Texas than in all of Canada, making Texas the place where many players learned their hockey skills. "Hockey Night in Dixie" examines this phenomenon with an historical overview of the period, including interviews with people involved in the founding and early years of each of the 13 leagues. There are also in-depth portraits of four teams, one from each of the four lower minor leagues that played during the 2005-06 season. These portraits feature interviews with owners, coaches, players, officials, fans and reporters. Amply illustrated with photographs, "Hockey Night in Dixie" paints a vivid picture of this extraordinary development in minor-league sports.

"Blue Ice" relates the tale of the University of Michigan's hockey program--from its fight to become a varsity sport in the 1920s to its 1996 and 1998 NCAA national championships.

This history of the hockey program profiles the personalities who shaped the program--athletic directors, coaches, and players. From Fielding Yost, who made the decision to build the team a rink with artificial ice before the Depression (which ensured hockey would be played during those lean years), to coaches Joseph Barss, who survived World War I and the ghastly Halifax explosion before becoming the program's first coach, to Red Berenson, who struggled to return his alma mater's hockey team to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. Players from Eddie Kahn, who scored Michigan's first goal in 1923, to Brendan Morrison, who upon winning the 1996 national championship with his goal said, "This is for all the Michigan] guys who never had a chance to win it."

"Blue Ice" also explores the players' exotic backgrounds, from Calumet in the Upper Peninsula to Minnesota's Iron Range to Regina, Saskatchewan; how coach Vic Heygliger launched the NCAA tournament at the glamorous Broadmoor Hotel; and how commissioner Bill Beagan transformed the country's premier hockey conference.

In "Blue Ice," fans of hockey will learn the stories behind the curse of the Boston University Terriers, the hockey team's use of the winged helmet, and the unlikely success of Ann Arbor's home-grown talent.

Unlike other sports at the collegiate level, the hockey players at Michigan haven't been motivated by fame or fortune; rather, they came to Michigan get an education and to play the game they loved.

John U. Bacon has won numerous national writing awards and now freelances for "Sports Illustrated, ""Time, ""ESPN Magazine, "and the "New York Times," among others.

The untold story of hockey's deep roots from different regions of the world, and its global, cultural impact. Played on frozen ponds in cold northern lands, hockey seemed an especially unlikely game to gain a global following. But from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, the sport has drawn from different cultures and crossed boundaries--between Canada and the United States, across the Atlantic, and among different regions of Europe. It has been a political flashpoint within countries and internationally. And it has given rise to far-reaching cultural changes and firmly held traditions. The Fastest Game in the World is a global history of a global sport, drawing upon research conducted around the world in a variety of languages. From Canadian prairies to Swiss mountain resorts, Soviet housing blocks to American suburbs, Bruce Berglund takes readers on an international tour, seamlessly weaving in hockey's local, national, and international trends. Written in a lively style with wide-ranging breadth and attention to telling detail, The Fastest Game in the World will thrill both the lifelong fan and anyone who is curious about how games intertwine with politics, economics, and culture.