In 1992, Manon Rheaume became the first woman ever to lace up the skates in an NHL game in an exhibition contest. She was the goalie for the Tampa Bay Lightning on two separate exhibition games – one against the St. Louis Blues and another in 1993 against the Boston Bruins. Who’s to say that cannot happen again?
Rheaume took a major leap for women not just in hockey, but all professional sports. Even though she played just two preseason games, she will always be the first to even try it out. Obviously, in the end, it didn’t work out. After those two games, she was never seen at the NHL level again.
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But the fact that she was there is a milestone. It lets everyone know that it is very much possible, especially since it happened when fighting in hockey was extremely common. Granted, again, she was a goalie, yet still, goalie fights did happen too.
Through the years, hockey has changed rapidly. It went from a slow pace, fight every 10 seconds kind of game to a fast pace, still fighting every 30 seconds kind of game. Now, it is a fast pace, skills-oriented game. The ideal player back in the day was someone who could hit hard and fight harder.
Today, however, that isn’t nearly the case. A glaring statistic to look at is the decline in the physical nature of the sport. With more reports of concussions and brain injuries arising in football and hockey, fans have been calling for better player safety precautions.
These outcries force the league’s hand in enforcing rules and instituting new precautions. Not to mention the continued development of equipment further protects the players as well. Though injuries still occur, the rate at which fights happen and hits are thrown continue to decline. Hitting continues to have a lesser effect on play, thus players don’t try and risk getting out of position to attempt a hit as often. Meanwhile, it has been proven that fighting is in a very real decline in the NHL.
During the 1985-86 NHL season, according to Andrew Miller of The Post and Courier, the league average for fighting was 1.2 fights per game. Last season, that figure was at 0.2 per game. The fewest amount of fights for an entire team that 1985-86 season was the New York Islanders with 50 fights. Last season, the Bruins led the league with 26 fights. Also in the 85-86 NHL season, the Detroit Red Wings led the league with 154 total team fights, whereas the entire league combined last season recorded 226 fights.
Nowadays, some of the best players like Sidney Crosby and Nikita Kucherov are 5’11″, Johnny Gaudreau is 5’9″. Rising star Alex DeBrincat at 5’7″. Crosby is 201 pounds, Kucherov is 178, Gaudreau is 150, and DeBrincat is 165.
The average height for the players is 5’9.5″ while their average weight is 173.5 pounds. The average weight of all women aged 20 and above, according to the Center for Disease Control, is 170.6 pounds, just a hair below the average of the players mentioned. Meanwhile, the average woman’s height is 5’4″, which is notably smaller.
Meanwhile, the average height of NHL players today lands at 6’1″ with the average weight being 199.3 pounds. However, shorter players are breaking onto the scene and becoming more common. In the most recent NHL draft, Cole Caufield, who was picked 15th overall by the Montreal Canadiens, stands at just 5’7″ and 163 pounds. The league is continuously getting smaller and faster as the years go by.
With the physicality declining, and the players becoming smaller in stature, the societal view of the “petit” woman is less at risk. Granted, hitting will continue. Hell, even fighting will still happen from time to time. But you have to believe that there are many women who can take a hit from a grown man and get back up.
There’s also the fact of people complaining about extra player safety making the game too soft. Of course, there will always be that old-school hockey man that will be opposed to even considering putting a woman on the ice amongst these burly, tough, and savage men. But society has changed rapidly in recent years, with minorities being granted more and more rights in many different ways, including women.
Society as a whole is viewing women as equals to men in many respects, though there are still some areas that need to be worked on. As a whole, however, society has adapted to all of these rapid changes, so why can’t sports?
What better way to measure a player’s skill with the All-Star Game skills competition? Last season, the NHL invited USA Women’s Hockey captain Kendall Coyne-Schofield to participate with men during the skills competition. It was a nice gesture by the NHL and a big leap for Coyne-Schofield to make, pushing young women across the world to give it their best shots as well.
One of the events that Coyne-Schofield participated in was the fastest skater competition. Her time doing a lap around a full-sized ice hockey rink was 14.346 seconds. The fastest skater in the competition was Connor McDavid, who clocked in at 13.378. She also beat out several other men who participated.
Teammate Hilary Knight was also invited and allowed to play in the shot accuracy challenge. It took her 10 shots to hit the targets and it only took her 11.64 seconds to do so. Brock Boeser won that competition, hitting all 5 targets in 11.136 seconds, roughly 0.5 seconds faster than what Knight scored.
The US Women’s National team averages in at 5’6.5″ and 153.13 pounds. That’s considerably smaller. However, the three biggest women on the team average out at 5’11″ and 169 pounds. That’s much closer, and it further displays that only a select few women would be capable to withstand playing in a physical environment such as men’s ice hockey.
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In hockey, especially with the way female ice hockey players have been pushing to get their names heard, as well as the ever-diminishing role of physicality in the sport, women very well could be skating alongside Crosby and McDavid in games that actually matter.
