Evgeny Kuznetsov practices with Bauer stick that has hole in the blade | Hacker News Reader

Evgeny Kuznetsov practices with Bauer stick that has hole in the blade

russianmachineneverbreaks.com

86 pointspencerw62 comments

It's been crazy watching the evolution of hockey sticks from wood to aluminum shafts, then to carbon-fiber. The prices have steadily skyrocketed, but it's hard to deny the incredible effects of just these material design changes. There are of course trade-offs, most notable being the tendency of these new carbon fiber sticks breaking without much warning, or apparent wear. The speed at which the shot comes off the stick now is pretty mind-boggling, too, which makes it easy for me to justify 300+ for a stick. They tend to either break soon, or last a lot longer than old style wood sticks, or aluminum + wood blades, etc.

I'm eager to try out one of these new designs myself but the pricing is just absurd for a beer league even if I'm playing in the top non-pro league in Colorado, and one of the teams I play against is all retired well known pros.

Like anything it'll come down as the process is refined and likely this approach is adopted from top-to-bottom. Excited to try one out for sure!

I was in youth league hockey as carbon fiber sticks went from unheard of to ubiquitous. Carbon sticks failed in a spectacular way, but wood stills would also fail. They wouldn't break in two during a slapshot, but they would generally split along the bottom of the blade. If refs noticed it, you could get a penalty.

By the time my parents caved in and bought a wood stick, I was at the point of consuming one new stick nearly every time I was on the ice. At that point, the higher upfront cost ended up being worth it.

If refs noticed it, you could get a penalty.

I'm curious, what penalty gets called here? I wasn't aware there was a "your equipment fell apart" penalty.

I think the penalty was something to do with equipment safety.

I played in Canada, but this ruling seems quite similar to what was in effect for us: https://www.usahockeyrulebook.com/page/show/1084649-rule-605...

I think the worry is a broken stick has a chance of producing something sharp that can injure others. I think it is more of a worry when the break is along the shaft of a wooden stick (as you could stab someone, you're basically wielding a spear) but even a split along the bottom of a wooden stick's blade has the potential to lose splinters.

I think it's just called the "broken stick" rule. Specifically, if you break your stick, you HAVE to drop it on the ice immediately and be done with it. If you even skate back to the bench holding it, you can get called for a penalty.

How does the broken stick get off the field of play if you're not allowed to carry it off?

The nearest ref would pick it up and remove it once play left that area.

It stays on the ice until a whistle, then an official takes it off the ice. It can interfere with play, such as if a pick hits it, but players are not allowed to purposely interact with it.

It's actually not quite so simply as the ref near it grabbing it. Depending on the play, and where the broken stick is at, the ref may elect to leave it be. I've seen broken sticks get 'accidentally' kicked/nudge near, or in front of the net which causes a sort of clean pass prevention '6th player'. The ref is generally reluctant to get too into the middle area of the play so a broken stick can become a sort of extra player out there. It's a kind funny/unique situation that doesn't happen that often.

Intentionally moving a broken stick to block or possibly block the puck is also a penalty. It is one of the more "judgment call" type calls a ref can make.

Isn't the stick on the ice a hazard as well?

I have seen maybe a total of 15 minutes of hokey in my life so sorry if the question is dumb, but I would expect that there is a risk to stumble upon the stick?

In volleyball, if a ball rolls within the court, the play is stopped immediately (this happens quite often when you play on several courts side by side)

The answer to 'what happens if' in ice hockey is 'play goes on' more than in any other I'm aware of, I think it's great.

'Substitutions' being on the fly too (and <1m apart), there's just something kind of raw and basic about it. Obviously there's loads of rules, but the general gist/feel of it just seems a lot more.. I don't know, 'informal', or something, than other games.

https://www.usahockeyrulebook.com/page/show/1084649-rule-605...

The penalty here isn't because your equipment fell apart, it is if you keep playing with broken equipment then that is a penalty. If your stick breaks and you drop it on the ice then you are fine.

Broken sticks are sharp so playing with one is a safety hazard.

Yeah I mean while it's technically possible they'd call that, you generally don't see that happen very often, if ever. They're use to be a blade curve limit rule too, which probably still exists but I couldn't tell you the last time I saw the tool they used to check that in a time-keeper box, beer league or NHL even.

Basically the rule is there in case the stick is broken in such a way that it becomes sharp and dangerous, which generally would mean it's not functional anyway. In that case you are required to drop the stick on the ice and get a new one mid-play, or get off the ice.

Silky scenarios and question (not a hockey watcher): my stick gets damaged and becomes unsafe. I drop it in the ground. The damaged stick is on the ground (as per people's comments below - until there is a break - what happens to me? I just skate around aimlessly, or I can go grab another stick and continue playing?

Yes to both. If you're on defense generally you stay stickless and cover a guy at the point (blueline, furthest from the goal). If you're a defensemen and lose your stick a forward generally gives you theirs because you're more important and they play the stickless role covering lesser threats further away.

If you're not on defense, you skate to the bench and grab a new stick or jump off and another player with a stick jumps on.

Or, same player linked in article, Evgeny Kuznetsov, finds an opponent's stick caught in glass and takes it and plays with it (also happens to be a penalty, but a hilarious one) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYUdIDyNXg

ohashi is correct.

I would add that what you as a player do after you drop a broken stick depends upon where you are and in what direction you are skating on the ice, where the puck is, and which team has possession of the puck.

If you are in the offensive zone and your stick breaks, you drop it out of the way of the play so your team's offense is not disrupted. If your team has the puck, you retreat to your bench where an equipment manager hands you your replacement stick which he got because he saw you broke yours a few seconds ago.

If your team lost the puck in the offensive zone as a result of a shot where your stick broke, you drop your stick in a way most likely to disrupt the other team, and you start playing defense without a stick until you can get back to the bench for a new stick, or until a player who can more easily get to the bench hands his to you.

If your stick breaks in the defensive zone, you are more likely to just start playing defense without a stick.

If a goaltender loses or breaks his stick, everyone in organized hockey has been taught to offer their stick to the goalie. Some goalies want any stick. Other goalies will play without a stick until his/her stick can be retrieved or until a stoppage of play.

In most sets of hockey rules, the goaltender is the only player who is allowed to continue playing with a broken stick.

Doesn’t the retired pros team beat everyone? Or are they super old. My perception was that the professionals are in a completely different galaxy than even top amateurs, unless you were on the cusp of playing in the NHL yourself.

They're mostly above 50, but are still incredible athletes. The team I'm on is all 20-somethings, most of which played Division 1, club or similar, with a mix of some recent ex-pro Eastern Hockey League players; just the nature of the league, top talent needs somewhere to play if going pro isn't an option and none of us want to sandbag in a lower division, that's just not fun.

I would also say that the younger players are way higher aerobic conditioning and the speed of top amateurs approach pro level speed now in these top tier leagues. I track my speed on my Apple watch I regularly hit low/mid 20 MPH during these league games, and I'm probably the 3rd or 4th fastest guy on the team (and def the oldes - thank god for those REHIT sprint workouts I do). So when you add it all up, the ex-pros have their hands full for sure. It's a lot of fun though, and generally the ex-pros play hard but rarely get worked up/hot/chippy and our games against them tend to be the most clean, skilled games we have. And no, they most certainly don't win every games, they're in the top half for sure always though.

Out of curiosity what league is this? I'm in Colorado as well and I've been looking for a good adult league. I'm a peg or two below you though

Promenade.

> steadily skyrocketed

Missed opportunity to talk about “hockey stick growth”

> new carbon fiber sticks breaking without much warning

I think it was an F1 article when I was reading about it, apparently carbon fiber creates a lot of small particles that when inhaled get lodged in your lungs akin to crushed asbestos .

I wonder if this is something to worry about.

In F1 the body of a bolid would literally disintegrate on impact (thus absorbing a lot of energy) so that is a lot of shattered carbon fiber in comparison to a part of a hockey stick.

>I think it was an F1 article when I was reading about it, apparently carbon fiber creates

Just when in contact with fire, but you are absolutely correct.

The oars used in competitive rowing switched from wood to carbon fibre in the early 1980s. The Dreissigacker brothers sold their first pair of carbon oars in 1977, and AFAIK 1984 was the last Olympics where wooden oars were used.

Even at the start, carbon oars were cheaper than wooden ones, possibly because of the shape of the material...

Wonder if hockey will either go the way of Tennis (where technology has rapidly changed how the game has been played) or baseballe - where the bats are always wood.

I don’t think they should or ever will step away from wood bats. It’s one of the few things that levels the playing field for all batters; instead letting brute force be the power behind the contact.

Aluminum and corked bats would ultimately give an unfair advantage to the user as compared to a wood slugger. It’s fine in minor league and collegiate sports as they do not follow the MLB’s stricter regulations but if they plan to aim for the major leagues, they should start training with wood.

—

On second thought, I think the only time there would be a change is if there were a noticeable impact on the environment and the amount of word being cut to produce bats. But since America’s trademark sport is baseball, I do not see this happening any time soon.

Aluminum and corked bats also become a player safety issue in the majors. It's already a problem at all levels honestly, but the balance would be far more dangerous increasing already high major league exit velocities.

BBCOR has solved this problem with metal bats; their COR is identical to wood bats (and likely worse in the aggregate).

Wood products harvested sustainably protect forest lands by increasing their economic viability. If forests lose economic value from timber, they are more likely to be clearcut for agriculture.

Edit: maple is also one of the most prevalent commercial timbers in USA, is native in most parts of the country and bat usage is so small a percent of maple consumption as to be effectively 0.

I think the rules of the game have more affect on how skaters play ice hockey than the equipment. Look at all the rule changes coming out of the lockout just to defeat the trap. The trap still would've been the problem it was if these sticks were around 15+ years ago.

Let's hope that hockey doesn't go exactly the way of baseball.

If you haven't noticed, pro baseball players have mostly switched from ash to maple. Maple bats now fail more often and they fail catastrophically, with sharp fragments flying at high speed. Players and fans are getting injured far more frequently, such as a Cubs player getting impaled [1].

At least baseball is starting to catch up with hockey in terms of nets that prevent objects flying into the fan areas.

[1] https://bats.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/cubs-bizarre-injur...

> Cubs rookie Tyler Colvin remains in the hospital Sunday night after a shard of teammate Welington Castillo’s maple bat punctured his chest during Chicago’s game against the Marlins. Colvin was on third base when Castillo broke his bat on a double down the left-field line. A larger piece of Castillo’s bat hit Colvin in the chest, with a sharp edge piercing his chest wall.

> Colvin is in stable condition at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. There was minimal bleeding, but doctors were trying to prevent a collapsed lung, according to MLB.com. If Colvin had been hit or cut in the neck, his injury could have been much more severe.

Hockey has already adopted revolutionary technology many times. Consider composite skate blade holders replacing steel blade holders, synthetic materials in protective equipment replacing leather, deer hair, and felt, aluminum and various sorts of composite and carbon fiber sticks replacing wooden hockey stick shafts, and so on.

I am a retired college hockey player who transitioned to officiating at the NCAA level.

Hockey seems to be constantly evolving both its technologies and its rules.

As an example of this (other than the new sticks being tested in the article), prior to the pandemic the NHL was set to introduce a new puck for the playoffs that would "will transmit data 60 times per second, including location, speed, acceleration and deceleration and distance travelled." There's similar tech ready to be rolled out for jerseys. The end goal being for advanced analytics to be able to map how fast everything is going and how the game moves, as well as to possibly aid in goal review (which is difficult with the shape of a puck, unlike say soccer/football with its round ball). They tested it at the All-Star game and teams have been practicing with it, but the league decided to hold off on it to reduce the potential point of failures during their return to play.

Source: https://www.tsn.ca/nhl-s-new-puck-will-premiere-on-opening-n...

location and speed at the same time? now THAT is interesting..

Jokes aside, that must be a serious problem in a game where they hit the puck with a wooden planck.

They probably chose 60Hz to match the broadcast framerate, but that doesn't seem fast enough to be accurate after fast collisions.

All that's lacking is augmenting the broadcast with a blue halo and a trail, and it's deja-vu all over again:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FoxTrax

I never understood why baseball doesn't just go all out aluminum. Make the stadiums bigger, put more players on the field, whatever...

Got distracted by the new post already added above this one, about the collapse of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge. In particular, other than its being a rare example of a spectacular bridge collapse that was more-or-less caught on film, I'm not sure it's a great example for an engineering ethics class. Because the most likely cause of its failure wasn't any particular ethical consideration, but the interaction of phenomema (wind vortex shedding and structural resonance) about which nobody had a lot of experience or knowledge at the time. Time goes by and we learn from the successes and the failures. Almost every major earthquake ends up pushing a few changes to the building codes. We now return you to your regularly scheduled hockey-related program.

(For people wondering what this comment is about, apparently the URL of the story got changed, and the previous version had something about Tacoma Narrows Bridge on the same page)

Puck bounce is already a weird randomization. It seems like have a hole in your blade that might hook the edge of the puck would only increase that randomness.

That is an interesting thought. Settling a puck is a skill that all players have to develop at some point. Nothing is worse than having a perfect shooting opportunity but the puck is on edge and you end up sending the puck off in some wild direction.

Not to worry, based on the videos in the article, the players are taping up the hole, at least 2/3rds of it.

There's a pretty strong tradition of wrapping tape around the blade that I imagine is hard to break. I wonder how much that hurts the supposed benefits.

The taping method is very player specific. For example, I like to tape from about an inch from the toe all the way back to the heel. Others, like just a few wraps near the toe. For me, a hole in the blade would have no aero benefits but for others, it could matter. The other benefits of the hole as they pertain to the blade flex would still be noticed regardless of taping style.

This reminds me slightly of RBK's O-Stick.

What am I looking at here ?

Is there, in fact, a web-based reference copy of a mailchimp brokered mailing list ? Do all mailchimp campaigns auto-generate these pages ? I have never seen this before.

I've never considered a mailing list, or mailchimp campaign, for rsync.net but for some reason those same things with a bloggy web page backing store behind it weirdly appeals to me ...

Most marketing email service providers provide something like this. If you've seen a link at the top of an email that says "view this in your web browser" you're probably looking at a link to a page hosted and generated by the ESP.

"View this in your browser" or "click here if you're having trouble viewing this message" type links seem to be very common on this mailing list type stuff, so I think it's a fairly standard feature.

You're looking at The Prepared (theprepared.org/newsletter), a weekly newsletter about manufacturing and other stuff! It's sent via Mailchimp, which automatically creates an archive URL for every email campaign you send.

I've set up MailChimp campaigns several times - traditional sales lists, transactional stuff, software update notifications - and never thought of using it as a hosted/linkable newsletter.

The "view this in your browser" link was always personalized for tracking, not semantic, IIRC. It did include the actual content of "Hello, {first name} {last name}!" tags, which obviously wouldn't work here for every unique reader.

How long does this stick around? As long as you have a MailChimp account?

I guess I assumed that the URL was unique per-user and would be deleted after 30 days, because the primary use case of Mailchimp seems to be not-quite-spam "We're having a sale!" bulk campaigns.

A lot of people use substack now because it's easier, but I still use mailchimp for my newsletter.

I guess I just like being different.

We've changed the URL from https://mailchi.mp/theprepared/the-prepared-4ydgzm58vl to the article that it points to, which seems to have the most information about the story.

I don't think an issue of a newsletter which contains a paragraph about one thing among lots of other things, plus promotional padding, really counts as an article about that thing for HN purposes. It seems more like an attempt to promote the newsletter than to share interesting information about hockey sticks.

IMO this ends up being way more advertorial (for Bauer) and lacks all of the engineering context (urethane inserts! damping! "the dichotomy between nature and human technologies"!). But, understood.

Perhaps; I haven't read that closely. Obviously it's great if you're writing something better about a topic, but there needs to be a specific URL to what you've specifically written about it.

wait, just to be clear - you changed the title and URL without actually reading the thing that I linked to?

I read your newsletter. I didn't read as much of the other article.

Is it really unclear what the issue here is? The issue is that the OP was too promotional. Indeed your account history on HN has been, basically, entirely promotional. That's not really what the site is for. This is in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

On HN, the idea is for people to submit stories that they ran across and personally found intellectually interesting, not because they have something to promote. It's fine to post your own work occasionally, as long as it's interspersed with interesting posts from other sources. But if you only submit promotionally, it feels like you're not participating as a community member.

To be fair, the stuff you've submitted has been good, certainly not spam. But the newsletter thing was a step too far.

I got a strong "Nimbus 5000" vibe reading this. It's pretty easy to read this and replace "stick" with "broom", "ice" with "arena", "quaffle" with "puck", and "hockey" with "quidditch" - and have it all sort of sound right.

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