Sure, winning games can be fun but there may be nothing more truly hockey, than a good nickname.
It’s part of being on a team, part of the locker room banter that makes the sport so fun.
The depth, the poetry of them would be enough to make Shakespeare jealous.
“You put a Y or an ER on to most of them and that’s what you get,” said Wolves Head Coach Cory Stillman or Stilly as his players call him.
“Even here for us, we’ve have Bully (Shane Bulitka), we have Gilly (Owen Gilhula), we have Soks (Dmitry Sokolov). those are the nicknames that the guys run and it’s usually just their last names.”
Okay, so maybe I was wrong about the intricacies of the process, but I wasn’t wrong about it being part of the culture.
But we now know how you create a nickname, but when do they come to be, do they grow over time or is there a big blank white board before the season and then when you establish rosters, you establish the nicknames?
“It just flows out of the mouth, what I’ve learned from the coaching side aspect and the player development usually you know their nickname before you learn their real name,” said Stilly.
It starts from the NHL and works its way down, you can even hear the classic nicknames used on a Saturday night at your local rink.
In fact it’s so much so that birth names are often never used.
“I don’t think I’ve ever called someone by their first name,” said Reagan O’Grady.
In practice when things get heated nicknames are still used.
“Nickname, full name, it’s probably the tone of our voices that they know things didn’t go well,” said Stilly.
But the ears do perk up whenever you don’t hear a nickname.
“If they call you by your first name then you really know you’re in trouble,” said Kyle Rhodes.
Rhodes or Rhodesy said its personal preference on how you would spell Rhodsy, we tried to look it up in our Canadian Press style guide, and there wasn’t a chapter on hockey nicknames so we had no reference point.
I was born with the unfortunate disadvantage of having possibly and un-nicknameable name, ironic as my name is Nick.
Parents may not like it, maybe even despise it, but a hockey nickname is part of the good old hockey game that we love.
What would your nickname be?
