What skills are required to become a pro hockey player? Whenever

You need to be an excellent skater, be physically strong with good endurance, be very proficient with your stick (puck handling, shooting and passing are more difficult than it looks), and have good awareness of the ice, ability to make plays on the fly, etc.

People really underestimate how difficult ice hockey is. The fact that you have to be able to stickhandle, shoot, pass, etc WHILE skating is very difficult. There's a reason children who start skating after the age of 5 almost never make it to the NHL

Good hand eye, and a great ass

>>76663242
>children who start skating after the age of 5 almost never make it to the NHL
i don't believe you.

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>skills

>>76663391
You can not believe me all you want but the vast, vast majority of players who make it to the NHL are on skates right after they learn to walk.

If you can't skate, you can't play. You have to be as comfortable skating and performing all kinds of maneuvers while stickhandling as you would while running. Imagine trying to make any other sport if you didn't know how to run. And I don't mean slow, I mean physically inept at moving your body around.

>>76663489
>>76663242
>>76663489
So what truly distinguishes an NHL player from an AHL player or top college hockey player? Are those in the NHL just bigger and faster? Sorry for the dumb questions.

>>76663683
>Sorry for the dumb questions
Not dumb at all. I welcome any opportunity to share my favourite sport with people showing any level of interest

>So what truly distinguishes an NHL player from an AHL player or top college hockey player?

A number of factors, there are players who are missing certain pieces to their game like they're too slow, too small, bad puckhandling, bad skating etc,

But the biggest one is the ability to analyze the game. The most successful ones tend to be the ones with the highest 'hockey iqs', meaning they're able to anticipate plays, find openings, create scoring chances, etc better than their peers. There are countless examples of players who are big and strong, excellent skaters and have great shots but don't succeed in the NHL because they simply aren't able to 'think' the game at the pace of play in that league.

>>76663423
>being named Jack Skill-e
>having skill

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>>76663876
>Being a Vancouver Canuck
>Having skill

>>76663899
but Chris Tanev will surely get us 3 1st rounders if we trade him!?!

Can you skate backwards?

>>76663993
Knowing Benning we'll probably get a 1st rounder, a middling prospect and a serviceable replacement dman in exchange for Tanev and a second

>>76664071
I can't wait until we have a team full of Gudbransons

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>>76664053
>skating backwards

>>76664105
But he has North American heart

>>76663391
Skating is the biggest hill to overcome. You never see anyone pick it up on a whim at 14 and then make it to the pros like you see in other sports. It takes years to master that in a game envoirnment. It's the only sport where the means of movement is foreign, it's like trying to learn how to walk while people are trying to kill you.

I was a pretty good multisport athlete growing up and decided to pick up hockey when I was a sophomore/junior in high school. I spent about a year and a half practicing and about 95% of that was simply skating. Once I started playing I was still ass purely because I couldn't skate at a competitive level and this was in Ohio so the level of competition was nothing compared to what the vast majority of nhl players face growing up.

>>76663189
Need to be able to do ice skating pal

>>76664204
How popular is hockey in Ohio? I wouldn't expect it to be on the level of the other big 4 sports but have the blue jackets grown the game at all?

the most important thing in becoming a nhl player is rich parents

the reason hockey is still white is you need parents spending 10-20k a year when you're 15 and in rep bantam so you can move away from home at 16/17 to play major junior

>>76664257
Moderately. I played in 2003-04 and it was a complete meme with like 5-6 teams in Columbus. Now there's ~20, state sanctioned leagues and tournaments. It's a lot more popular than it use to be but there's still no talent pipeline at all and only a thing in big and/or upper income high schools.

I actually learned to play almost entirely by going to the blue jackets practice facility because it was 1 of only 2 open rinks in the whole city open at the time to understand where it came from.

>>76663391
>i don't believe you.
its true. I struggled to make the NHL after a late start in hockey, I started when I was 10, and it was basically impossible to catch up. By the time I was 18 I was good enough to make it to D2 college hockey, but I failed every junior tryout I had. I was great in every league and sport I played in, top end athlete (played D1 lacrosse, full ride, walked onto our football team and was a starter senior year too at RB), yet for hockey I was up against people who started <5yo and never was as good as them.

This is a sport where if you want to make it you basically need to start playing it when you learn to walk. Its the only way you'll ever be a good enough skater to allow all the other skills in hockey to come naturally.

>>76664392

Yeah it's definitely not a sport for poor families. That's why floorball is pretty popular here. It's the perfect game if you can't afford to play hockey.

>>76663391
That's true, except for a very very minutely small amount of players who got into it late, I cant even think of any in the NHL that did. You have to be able to skate without thinking about it at all, stop well on both feet, pivot perfectly (both are a lot harder than you think if you dont know how to skate), etc. Most people don't get "good" at skating until they're in their teens, after already being on skates since like 5 or 6. My dad apparently had me in skates when I was 3, I dont even remember earning to skate.

Then you have to know how to shoot it, which again, isn't easy. If you've never shot a puck on ice before it would probably take you months of practice to even be able to lift it off the ice in some semblance of a wrist shot. Again, most players don't get "good" at shooting until like 5-10 years after they started playing.

Then you have to know your position, you can get away with it as a kid kind of, but if you aren't in the right spot as a teenager or older, you're going to get burned hard and cause a goal.

Then you have to do all those things in a game while people are actively trying to hurt you, and if you think about something for longer than a tenth of a second you're out of position because everyone is moving around at like 20+km/h.

There's so much more shit too, like how to rotate your hips properly to not lose too much speed, or how to square your shoulders up and use your momentum properly when shooting the puck without giving too much away to the defenceman/goalie, how to stick handle effectively without losing too much speed, when to do certain things like carry it in vs dump it in, when to change, how to change, how to rotate positions while cycling down low, how to defend against various situations (2 on 1, 3 on 2, 1 on 1, etc)

>>76663189
Good hair, good bants, good ass

>>76665172
lets not even get into goaltending.

I was a goaltender in the 90s, by then patrick roy had transformed goaltending instruction and turned the position into a martial art. What is crazy is if you do the math, playing goal is litterally conditioned guessing. Because it's not physically possible to actually react to a 70 mph snap shot in the slot. That shot will be past the goaltender in .03 seconds. it takes about that much time just for the eyes to see the shot, the brain to process what it saw, and then send electric signals to the muscles. meaning if you react to the puck leaving the stick it's past the goaltender before he can even move in reaction to it.

So they train goaltenders to react to the sound of the shot. To cover space, to basically play with a blindfold to find where they are in the net without checking how to move fast, how not to drag your back foot, how to get up as fast as you go down. how to go down faster, how to use the SAME SAVE for the same shot every time, so it's muscile memory.

Then you play the position and you make saves, amazing fucking saves that has the audience standing on their heads and you have to admit to yourself, you NEVER saw the puck, only saw the hands of the shooter, and you don't even remember reacting to the shot.

THAT'S how fucking zen you have to be as a top end goaltender. you're basically reading body language and GUESSING where the shot will go. and if you're good at it you'll stop 9 in 10 shots. I was good at it, stopped 9.3 in 10, and still wasn't good enough to make it to the NHL

>>76664392
Also this.

>>76665348
I was actually goalie too, but I figured a player's perspective would be more relateable

For shots like that as you said, reacting was more or less impossible, you basically just wanted to take away as much of an angle as possible. Although sometimes you'd get almost ESP and your hand would just move without thinking about it and the puck would go into your glove somehow. Although I'd pay more attention to things like the angle of the guys stick when it contacted the ice, how his shoulders were facing, what he usually liked to do (some guys would always try to pick a corner if they had a clear shot), how fast he was going, whether he was under pressure, what hand he was and what side of the ice he was on, etc to try and figure out what he was doing rather than just reacting to the shot. If you dont have a plan in place (even as simple as "go down") before the shot is fired and try to just react to it, you're fucked before it even leaves his stick.

and ya, I was minor hockey/junior good, but definitely not NHL good. although goalies do mature late and I did have interest from teams/colleges before I got hurt and missed almost a whole season, the likelihood of making the NHL even if you're amazing is super low. I played with 3 people over my years of hockey who are in the NHL right now, and that's way above average. And the funny thing is, they weren't even the best players on the team as kids

B-BUT VOX TOLD ME THAT HOCKEY IS ALL ABOUT LUCK AND BASKETBALL IS THE TRUE SPORT OF SKILL

>>76665890
Hockey does have a lot of random bouncing and shit but its the players ability to capitalize on it that often makes the difference. It takes a high amount of skill to do that.

And the skill floor for hockey is much higher than pretty much any other sport, due to the aforementioned need to be a good skater.

>>76663189
Your best bet is honestly to tryout for a college team, but learn some skating skills at least first

>>76665937
>but learn some skating skills at least firs
If he hasn't been playing hockey for most of his life there is not a single college team he could make.

>parents are poor as fuck
>never got to play ice hockey as a kid
>never even got to skate until I was 10
>those skates were hand me downs that were 3 sizes too small
>i was fantastic at road and floor hockey
>great stick handling and great shooting
>kids in hockey leagues think I'm great and are surprised I don't play ice hockey
>they invite me to play at an outdoor rink
>think my stick handling would be great on ice as well
>this is my first time playing hockey on ice
>i can barely even touch the puck with my stick
>none of the hockey league kids ever talk to me again after that
Hockey being a rich man's sport is not a meme.

great thread

I actually respect hockey more now. Too bad it'a not as entertaining to watch as it is to play.

don't mind me.