I’ve spent a lot of time over the holiday break in hockey arenas (or at outside rinks), and been able to witness a simply incredible breadth of examples of both icing and offsides.

I, like nearly everyone else who doesn’t play the sport, conflate the two pretty much non-stop. So I’m periodically looking up their meaning to re-orient myself. At the level that Grant plays at, the kids are constantly doing one of these or the other, and I’m not sure they know what they mean, either. Their on-ice behavior implies they do not, but I’m positive it varies from kid to kid at this age. Anyway, there’s a lot of game stoppage due to either icing or offsides.

Here’s what’s important, or at least helpful: you can ice the puck, and you can be offsides.

Icing happens when someone kicks the puck from their half of the ice (before the center line) to beyond the far (opposing) goal line. It became a rule that you can’t do this because hockey got incredibly boring in the 1930s — you could simply run down the clock by putting all your players in front of your goal and shooting the puck to the other end of the ice so the offensive players had to go skate down to collect it. So you need to be at least over the center line to shoot the puck to beyond the goal line. If you’re not over the center line, you’re icing the puck. It looks like the NHL has some exceptions to the icing rule (penalty kills and something to do with the goalie leaving the crease), but this isn’t applicable to 9U / USA Hockey, so we won’t worry about it.

Offsides is when an offensive player crosses the opposing blue line before the puck. The center line (red) is flanked by two blue lines (…blue) and these blue lines create the neutral zone between them. The blue line to the boards (behind the net) is the either offensive or defensive zone, depending on what’s happening and who’s playing which goal, and who has the puck. I guess we can just called them the possessed zone, and I’m not sure why no one else has thought of that yet. From my research, it looks like the way to think about these possessed zones is that a player (and therefore their team) is either defending this zone, or attacking this zone. To spell it out further, you attack the zone your goalie is not in, and defend the one they are in. Ok! So to come back to the beginning. Offsides is when an attacking player enters the possessed zone (crosses the blue line) before the puck. You can’t go camp down in front of the other team’s goal and wait for a long-ice pass. This is the one the kids violate the most, in my experience, because it can be hard to keep track of where the puck actually is, and where you are, when play is getting exciting. In a bit of added history, it looks like this rule came into effect in the NHL in the late 1920s, AND forward passing in hockey was only allowed in stages around the same time. Prior to that, you could only pass backwards, but handle the puck moving forwards. Wild!

There’s a lot more nuance to both of these rules, to accommodate elite skill levels, but these are the rules at their most basic. I’m sure I will forget this almost immediately.