It might be easy to dismiss all hockey sticks as one and the same, but nothing could be further from the truth. Last month we reported that wooden sticks have completely vanished from the NHL, and last week The Wall Street Journal offered an interesting take on how hockey sticks are becoming as unique as “fingerprints.”
Seriously, the days of taking a stick off the rack, putting your own custom brand of tape on it and hitting the ice it seems is long over. With many materials now allowing for ever so slight adjustments hockey sticks have gone high tech – in low sort of ways. Players had traditionally made small tweaks back in the day of wooden sticks, but now players can adjust their composite and graphite sticks – and even have the manufacturer run off a batch.
However, notes the WSJ, the sky is not the limit on what tinkering can be done:
“Of course, there are limits to how much tinkering the players can do. The NHL stipulates that no stick may be longer than 63 inches from knob to heel, unless the player is taller than 6-foot-6. And, more importantly, the blade may not be curved more than three-quarters of an inch—a number that refers to the distance between the top of the curve and an imaginary line drawn between the heel and toe of the stick.”
But even with simple tools like a blow torch and a sander, hockey sticks are truly become custom tools for the game on the ice.