Who invented curved hockey stick

The first sticks were carved from birch and hornbeam trees. As ice hockey grew across North America, maple became the wood of choice. Maple hockey sticks stayed relatively the same for decades, with some modifications made to the shaft, such as lamination to add longevity to the stick and some modest flex.

The stick blade that controls the puck remained flat for the hockey stick's first years. Then things, well, took a curve during the s. Chicago Blackhawks legend Stan Mikita is often credited with experimenting with a bend in his blade to get more lift and velocity on his shot. The story is Mikita was taking shots after practice with another Hall of Fame teammate Bobby Hull when Mikita broke the blade on a stick, leaving it curved.

He took a shot with the cracked stick and was intrigued by the results. Mikita and Hull would continue to experiment curving their blades, referring to them as "banana blades. The late Mikita scored goals and is widely considered one of the best two-way offense-defense players of all time, plus among the game's truest gentlemen.

Bathgate claimed he had been using curves since his youth and that he allowed Mikita to borrow a stick when the Blackhawks were in New York one night. Whether it was Mikita or Bathgate, the game's best players were suddenly able to shoot harder and easily lift the puck, making life tough for goalies.

Eventually, the NHL reigned in the curved madness a bit, by limiting how much curve a blade can have on it. Today's players all have some level of curve in their stick and couldn't imagine going back to the old, flat blade days. For the last 30 years, players and stick manufacturers have moved from wood to aluminum to the composite sticks used today.

As the stick evolved, so has the game. Aluminum shafts started making their way into the game. Wrist flicks were big. Slap shots were used, but nobody was sniping the top shelf. According to a Feb. Mikita had never been in the top 10 in league scoring prior to the season.

From that season on, he and Hull were both in the top 10 for eight straight seasons, finishing three times. Soon, curved blades became wildly popular.

Too popular. Big curves increased velocity, but they also made it tough to control the powerful shots they produced.

So, in the NHL legislated limits on the curve, first to one inch, then to a half-inch. And players continue to massage their sticks. The difference in power of the two types of shot might have been negligible in the wood-stick era, but with the flex of contemporary sticks the drag-and-snap nearly maximizes the power potential of the flex. The drag-and-snap would have been considerably harder with the flat blade because the curvature keeps the shooter from spraying wide, thus their shots frequently came from closer to the heel of the blade and without the type of shot that would fly off the open end.

The curve is sometimes attributed to influencing goaltenders to switch to masks ; that might be a little bit of a stretch, as Jacques Plante started wearing his mask as had Terry Sawchuk, Gerry Cheevers well before the curve became commonplace, and sticks themselves were just as dangerous as pucks, but that doesn't negate a different general shift.

The curve helps to "grab" the puck during a wrist or snap shot, and thus gives it easier lift as the player's follow-through raises off the ice. This makes it far easier, sometimes without even trying, to get a shot off the ice. Top-shelf, saucer pass, off the glass An overwhelming majority of the pre-curve games were played from the knees down, and a great number of the higher shots were from the backhand. So I guess you could say that while I'm skeptical that the curve was the spark for the shift to goaltender masks, it certainly caps shades helped thaw the ice.

The curve on the blade reduces the potential directions the puck can leave the stick, most importantly the ones from which it would be hard to retrieve. A puck in the skates or a puck pushed forward five feet in front of you is far easier to regain control of than a puck that slips off the end of the blade. But this doesn't just help your average stickhandler; a player who's already slick with the puck gains additional control.

Watching Mikita with the puck, it's shocking how much his puck control stands out from the other players on the ice. The curve's arrival would also be timely for a young defenceman named Bobby Orr, who would use it to entirely change the way we think about blueliners.

The curved stick also imperiled a previously popular shot, the backhand, though the concern over the loss of the backhand masked the fact that it evolved to an equally effective place in the player arsenal. In the pre-curve games, it was common to see a player give the backhand the ol' heave-ho from the faceoff dot, though it never seemed to be a particularly dangerous shot it rarely rebounded because of its height.

This version of the backhand is pretty infrequent today, but where we do see the backhand is as a sort of "surprise shot.