A fellow parent on my son’s youth hockey team asked for a list of hockey book I recommend. I offer the following with the caveat that these are books I read, and there are others out there I have still yet to read or find.
Any list of hockey book begins with Ken Dryden. Simply put Dryden’s writings are a distant first and lead the pack in the same way Secretariat won the Preakness. Dryden played goalie for the 1970s Montreal Canadians Dynasty winning multiple Stanly Cups. During that run, Dryden took a year off of hockey to complete his law education and apprenticeship. He returned to the Canadians to etch his name a couple more times into sport’s greatest trophy. Following his playing career Dryden served in Canada’s Parliament. His writing captures the heart of what it means to be a hockey player, but further gives his readers insights into the history and evolution of the game. His first book The Game, is not only the best hockey book ever written, it’s arguably the greatest sports book ever written.
Best Quote: “Nothing is as good as it used to be, and it never was. The “golden age of sports,” the golden age of anything, is the age of everyone’s childhood.”
Summary: The best sports book ever written. Dryden’s first book takes the reader through his final year on the Canadians, the last year his team would win the Stanley Cup. But more than a memoir of his time on the ice, Dryden exposes the reader to the feelings of hockey players; what they think and why. Moreover, Dryden provides his broader philosophies of hockey and of life.
Game Change, The Life and Death of Steve Montador and the Future of Hockey by Ken Dryden
Best Quote: “Very few goals are scored in a game; very few can be allowed. Offence is about opportunities; defence is about mistakes.”
Summary: Steve Montador died in 2015. An examination of his brain following his death led to a diagnosis of CTE, a condition we increasingly find in football players and other athletes who suffer repeated blows to the head. Dryden uses Montador’s story, his career arc as the background in examining the evolution of the game, and the intersection of modern science, medicine, and sports. Dryden does a deep dive into the impacts of concussions and offers perspectives of ways hockey can evolve and become a better, safer game.
Scotty, A Hockey Life Like No Other by Ken Dryden
Best Quote: “Most prodigies never play Carnegie Hall. In their lives, so focused on learning the notes, they never create their own music.”
Summary: Ken Dryden provides a unique biography of perhaps the hockey’s greatest coach, Scotty Bowman. Dryden does this by walking the reader through Bowman’s life filled in with interviews of Scotty talking about the greatest hockey teams of all time, from the 70s Canadians to the 80s Islanders and Oilers, to the 90s/00s Red Wings to the 2010s Blackhawks. Bowman offers a unique perspective behind each of these teams. By chronicling these teams, Dryden and Bowman also provide a history of the evolution of hockey.
Hockey books provide us more than insight into the game at the professional level, there are a couple terrific books that discuss hockey at the youth level.
Best Quote: “I don’t buy for a second the notion of “quality time.” There’s only time, and wherever you spend it, that’s what you care about—and everyone knows it.”
Summary: John Bacon spends a year chronicling how he turned a historically bad hockey team to a constant championship contender. While the book certainly paints a picture of Michigan high school hockey, it is more of a leadership book whose lessons can apply to business, the military, or any other organization that prides itself on leader development. Bacon details how he implemented simple rules, changed the culture of his team, and gave ownership of the team’s outcome to the players. His book is a nice reminder that the ultimate form of respect is self-respect. And when your team respects itself, the possibilities are endless.
Pee Wees: Confessions of a Hockey Parent by Rich Cohen
Best Quote: “He can’t skate the cones and doesn’t nail the drills. All he can do is play hockey.”
Summary: Rich takes the time to tell the story of his son’s year in Pee Wee hockey. His son plays in Fairfield Connecticut, a fairly wealthy suburb of New York City. Throughout the book Cohen details some of the insanity that is filling the ranks of youth sports. The pressure cooker of tryouts that tell very little about character, leadership, and work ethic…the most important traits of a hockey player.
While players and coaches can provide insider information, Gare Joyce, a sports writer went inside the world of scouts and has provided the hockey reader innumerable insights into the game. The thought and effort he gives to writing about life in the juniors is invaluable to someone looking to understand how one advances from youth hockey to the pros.
Future Greats and Heartbreaks: A Year Undercover in the Secret World of NHL Scouts by Gare Joyce.
Best Quote: “Those who play and those who played see a different game than even the most dedicated spectator…It is proven every year.”
Summary: If there is a writer who comes in a distant second to Ken Dryden, it’s Gare Joyce. In this book Joyce travels the world watching high level junior hockey tournaments throughout Canada, the U.S., and Europe. He comes across a multitude of future NHL stars to include Patrick Kaine, Phil Kessel, and Sidney Crosby in their teenage years. What’s fascinating about the book is the details about the game and about players Joyce picks up by talking to other players. In a sense, the best scouts aren’t the ones who sit in the stands, it’s the ones who sit in the locker rooms and skate on the ice with their peers. But for every future star spending their youth in junior hockey, away from their parents, and away from a normal childhood, Joyce comes across scores of others who will never play in one game in the NHL.
Best Quote: “In hockey’s first century the NHL provided jobs to hundreds of players who would have told you that hockey was a game; for the most deeply invested, a passion. Now, however, for those who are even reasonably aspiring to the NHL, hockey must be pursued with a professional rigour.”
Summary: A terrific book that looks at the hockey life of Sidney Crosby, from his time growing up in Cole Harbour to his multiple Olympic Gold Medals, World Championships, Stanley Cups, and unfortunately concussions. While Crosby serves as the central character of the book, Gare goes beyond the biography aspect to detail the inner workings of hockey from the junior levels through the NHL. There are the behind the scenes details such as providing a description of how the Canadian team was able to defeat the Americans in the 2010 Olympic finals (Crosby’s Golden Goal). Moreover, Gare provides insights into the evolution of the game since the 2005 lockout year. The game is faster and values speed, skating, an skill over size and toughness. Stars of today stand up for themselves, because keeping an enforcer or a fighter on the roster puts a team at a disadvantage.
Behind the Bench: Inside the Minds of Hockey's Greatest Coaches by Craig Custance
Best Quote: “You never know where you’re getting your best idea. It could be from your rookie player, it could be from your power skating instructor, it could be from the guy who cooks breakfast. You have to be open-minded.”
Summary: Another hockey book that is more in the lines of a leadership book. Behind the Bench is a look at the minds and methods of eleven of the best hockey coaches in the game today. More than a discussion of Xs and Os, Custance takes a unique perspective, and turns a hockey book into a leadership book, similar to what one would find in the business section of the local Barnes and Noble. Custance leadership themes that run throughout the book include the ability to manage talent, the role of luck, and the role of self-reflection, enabling leaders to engage as lifelong students of their profession.
Aligned with leadership books are those that speak to innovative tactics and coaching techniques.
Tape to Space: Redefining Modern Hockey Tactics by Ryan Stimson
Best Quote: “Ideally, positions shouldn’t matter. From when they are first starting out, children should be taught how to read and react to various situations regardless of their designated position.”
Summary: The author takes a different look at how hockey should be played. In defiance of conventional wisdom, the author advocates for fewer systems and less defined positions in favor of players who can constantly stay in motion, read the opposing team and developing plays and skate accordantly. Five players acting as one in lieu of disparate offense and defense positioning. The innovative concepts in this book are not however appropriate for youth level, but rather for advanced higher level leagues, high level juniors, college, and professional hockey.
Tropic of Hockey: My Search for the Game in Unlikely Places by Dave Bidini
Best Quotes: “Sports taps into emotions we guard for the rest of our waking hours. Those who play sports, or who pledge love for their favorite teams, often find it impossible to express these feelings to wives, husbands, or children. We use games to vent our spirit, behaving in ways we can’t at work or home.”
Though we frame sport as singular events, they exist in a realm of perpetual play. Wins become losses that become victories. The score is inconsequential as long as you keep playing.”
Summary: An interesting travel type book that chronicles the author travelling to unique places to play hockey. In some ways this book is a travel memoir or travel blog and less a hockey book. But the best sports writing is when you write about something other than is tangential to the sport. Bidini tells us about his playing in seventh story of a mall in Hong Kong, in the city of Harbin in northern China, in Dubai in the desert of the United Emirates, and on to Transylvania, where the game is a war between Romanians and ethnic Hungarians, who were introduced to hockey by a 1929 newsreel of Canadians chasing the puck. Each rink has its unique story, some with strange designs and locations, and others with odd rink rats that you find in ice complexes throughout North America. It’s a fascinating tale and serves as a good reminder that no matter where you find yourself on earth, you can find someone like yourself.
Belfry Hockey by Darryl Belfry
Best Quote: “Often we don’t really know what “good” is until we see someone who’s actually good, and that goes for everything…. if you can skate and pass the puck, you can play at any level.”
Summary: A book for coaches that are looking to use more advanced ways to train their players and their teams. Belfry offers his ideas on how to slow drills down to focus on technique and skills then speed them up to game type situations.
Take Your Eye Off the Puck: How to Watch Hockey By Knowing Where to Look by Greg Wyshynski
Best Quote: “hockey is actually the perfect marriage of strategy and ingenuity; of preparation and improvisation; and of wisdom and will.”
Summary: This is a terrific book for kids, or anyone new to the game and who wants to gain a deeper understanding of the way hockey is played in today’s era. Often, the average spectator watches a game in the way mites or squirts play the game, by focusing on the puck, or the player with the puck. However, hockey is a game of rapid and continual movement by all players. Indeed, like in soccer, it is the players who don’t have the puck and move to the right space that put their teams in a position of relative advantage.
Burke's Law: A Life in Hockey by Brian Burke
Best Quote: “He was always three steps ahead. Visionaries look and see the next mountain and ask, “How do we get there?” Gary looks ahead and sees six mountains.
Summary: In this book, Brian Burke, architect of a Stanley Cup winning Anaheim details his thoughts on the best way to build a hockey team and to compete for the Stanley Cup. Along the way Burke tells the story of his hockey career, one in which he comes across all the famous names in hockey. Burke discusses how he had to deal with the league, other coaches, and the media as a General Manager. The flaw behind Burke’s theory of building a hockey team is that it’s meant for a bygone era. In the age of free-agency, general managers and head coaches must work with the players they can accumulate and modify their system to the talent they have, not the talent they wish to have (to paraphrase Don Rumsfeld’s quote of “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish to have”).
Summary: Decent book about the 1980 U.S. Men's Hockey Team. The author uses the game as a background to provide short biographical sketches of each member of the team. Unfortunately, this method leads to a distortion of the timeline of the game, and of events leading up to the game. There were some neat details on a few of the players, (Jim Craig went to Norwich for a week), and one player clearly had OCD. Despite the jumbled timeline, by giving each player his due, Coffey’s book will give you insights into the 1980 Olympic Hockey Team you find anywhere else.
No One Wins Alone: A Memoir by Mark Messier
Best Quote: “he was mindful of another painful recent lesson he’d learned. One minute you’re one of us. The next minute, you’re a guy in a suit who doesn’t play. You might have played once, but this isn’t what you do anymore. There’s a bigger wall there than you’d expect.”
Summary: A recap of the hockey life of one of the greatest players and leaders in the game. Messier takes the reader from his time in youth hockey through all the success of the 1980s Oilers and through his time leading the New York Rangers to their first Stanley Cup in 44 years.
Home Ice: Reflections on Backyard Rinks and Frozen Ponds by Jack Falla
Open Ice: Reflections and Confessions of a Hockey Lifer by Jack Falla
Best Quote: "I’ve never been unhappy on the rink."
I group Jack Falla’s books together because if you read one then you will read the other.
Home Ice is a collection of essays that center around Fall’s backyard rink. The rink serves as the main character who is at the center of Falla’s life events. The rink provides everlasting memories for the author as a husband, as a father, and as a friend to all those around him.
Open Ice is more of a collection of essays that describe Falla’s personal relationship to the game. Like any great sports writing the book is about something more than hockey. Open Ice is about family relationships, relationships to friends, and how gaps continually open and close within them. When you are apart of the game for 50-years, it becomes apparent that you can’t separate the personal and professional aspects of the game. Hockey is part of who you are, how you relate to other people, and how you mark the steps of your life.
The Science of Hockey: The Math, Technology, and Data Behind the Sport by Kevin Snow and John Vogl
Best Quote: “that black slab of vulcanized rubber was the greatest thing he’d ever seen”
Summary: An interesting book that describes the details of the game on the ice, off the ice, and on the details of the ice itself. Indeed, the authors tell us how thick most rinks keep the ice sheet which often depends on how often the ice is used. Other interesting notes include how teams approach the draft, injury prevention and recovery, and how NHL teams are adapting to sports science.
Breakaway: From Behind the Iron Curtain to the NHL—The Untold Story of Hockey’s Great Escapes by Tal Pinchevsky
Best Quote: ““I've learned to expect nothing from the Russians and I am never disappointed,”
Summary: Pinchevsky details the early years of Eastern European hockey players and their defections to the NHL. Before the famous Russians such as Federov, Larionov, and Fetisov, there were the Stastnys of Czechoslovakia, Petr Klima, and Peter Bondra. In some ways the details of how these players were able to defect to the West to play in the NHL reads like a spy thriller as players had to avoid the never blinking eye of the KGB and other communist nation agencies. The book is easy to follow as each chapter presents its own story behind various players and their journey (often with their family) from the grips of the Iron Curtain to the ice sheets of the NHL.
The Russian Five: A Story of Espionage, Defection, Bribery and Courage by Keith Gave
Best Quote: “The only place you can really identify a hockey player is on the ice, in the game”
Summary: In this book Keith Gave tells the story of how Sergei Fedorov, Viacheslav Fetisov, Vladimir Konstantinov, Vyacheslav Kozlov and Igor Larionov left the Soviet Union to join the NHL and eventually skate together to form the nucleus of a Red Wings Dynasty under Scotty Bowman. Like the previous book, this one reads like another spy thriller with secret meetings and bribes to public officials. The Russian Five brought with them their theory of hockey that the best form of defense was control of the puck. The book will make you search on YouTube videos of the Russian Five skating together and making opposing lines look like Squirts on the ice.
Draft Day: How Hockey Teams Pick Winners or Get Left Behind by Doug MacLean and Scott Morrison
Best Quote: “There is life after hockey, but hockey will always be a part of my life.”
Summary: One of the great hockey coaches and gerneral managers Doug MacLean provides his thoughts and insights on what it takes to build a hockey team through the draft. More than simple ideas, MacLean takes the reader on a history of the NHL draft that looks at the hits and misses over the years. Every year ther are first round busts and late round bloomers underscoring how it’s hard to make predictions on the future path of teenagers.
The Seven A.M. Practice by Roy MacGregor
Best Quote: “We can’t win at home, we can’t win on the road. My failure as a coach is that I can’t think of anywhere else to play.”
In this book, the author tells his own tales of being a parent and supporting his children in their youthful endeavors, which of course means driving kids to practice before the sun rises in frigid winter mornings. The book serves as a reminder to those currently watching our children grow up on the ice rink, the baseball diamond, the tennis court, or the football field that these are the golden years of parenthood, and for most kids who will never go on to play at the highest levels, it is their golden years of sports. The 7 A.M. practice may suck at the time, but when their gone you will spend the rest of your life wishing to have them back.
The Home Team: Fathers, Sons, & Hockey by Roy MacGregor
Best Quote: “When I look up, I see my father, and I see what he is dreaming: Dunc, forever young, skating faster and faster through life”
A profound story of some of hckey’s greatest stars and their relationship to their fathers. The book tells the personal tale of these relationships with Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, Paul Coffey and Marty McSorley during their famous tour of Europe. Other families discussed in this book include the Howes, the Hulls, the Dineens, and the Drydens. The story if the Hulls stands out with the telling of Bobby Hull (the Golden Jet) and his troubles marriage along with his absentee relationship with his son Brett.
The Last Season by Roy MacGregor
Best Quote: “A player like Matti doesn’t understand that the game is not the puck, the game is the flow, and that concept you cannot teach.”
A work of fiction by Roy MacGregor, and one of the better hockey fiction books out there. The story follows Felix Batterinski, a hockey player from Northern Ontario who earns his way as a fighter and as an enforcer for the Stanley Cup Champion Flyers. Following his playing career, Batterinski turns to work as a player-coach in Finland, where a controversial incident becomes the catalyst for his tragic downfall.
Wayne Gretzky’s Ghost: And Other Tales from a Lifetime in Hockey by Roy Macgregor
Best Quote: “Hockey is the dance of life, an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive.”
Second Best Quote: “Goaltenders form almost a secret society within the hockey world, so caught up in their own world that they have virtually created a second one for themselves.”
After Wayne Gretzky retired from playing hockey, Roy MacGregor was hired to ghost write some articles for #99 the following season. The book has these columns, then expands to include the author’s works over several decades.
Herb Brooks: The Inside Story of a Hockey Mastermind by John Gilbert
Best Quote: “having the best play the best can accelerate the development of a small group, but it also leads to self-fulfilling prophecy in which merely identifying elite players can be mistaken for developing them.”
A nice biography of Herb Brooks, who although famous for coaching the 1980 U.S. Hockey Team to Olympic Gold was brilliant in his other coaching endeavors. Brooks turned around high school teams, the University of Minnesota Hockey Team, coached reasonably well in Europe, and had a winning record as coach of the New York Rangers (a team that played in the same Division of the NY Islanders during their dynasty years). Brooks was a leader and an innovator, and a true champion of USA Hockey.
The Rebel League: The Short and Unruly Life of the World Hockey Association by Ed Willis
Best Quote: “Everyone says it’s the coaches who teach you the game, but it’s the players you play with and against. You learn by observing, and you learn through competition.”
A fascinating book the chronicles the World Hockey Association. The WHA came into existence during the time of alternate leagues of professional sports evidenced by the WBA, World Team Tennis, and eventually the USFL. The WHA changed the game and advanced it to a more recognizable and enjoyable game we watch today. Indeed, the WHA not only threw massive amounts of money to stars like Bobby Hull, they signed 18-year olds to contracts at a time when the NHL minimum age was 20. Thus Wayne Gretzky signing with Indianapolis and being sold to Edmonton ensured the star didn’t have to wait to turn 20 to play professionally. The WHA was also innovative in signing more Europeans who would change the face (and pace) of the game.
Draft Day: How Hockey Teams Pick Winners or Get Left Behind by Doug MacLean and Scott Morrison
Best Quote: “There is life after hockey, but hockey will always be part of my life.”
The authors detail what goes into selecting players for the NHL draft. From developing a solid scouting department to the value of in-person interviews and observations of each player, the book paints the picture of how players are selected and later developed. The authors provide a lot of insights, and help the reader understand that not all high selections are sure fire hits, and that how a team invests in and develops a player can be more important than the talent they were selected for.