The Hockey Chronicle: A Year-by-Year History of the National Hockey League is an extraordinary volume that traces the passionate pursuit of the Stanley Cup through colorful text and more than 1,000 photographs, starting with 1900 and progressing into the 21st century. This beautiful hardcover edition is an extensive history of hockey in North America, from the birth of the NHL to the "original six"—Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Maple Leafs, Detroit Red Wings, Boston Bruins, New York Rangers, and Chicago Blackhawks—to teams of the new millennium, like the Columbus Blue Jackets and Minnesota Wild. Each chapter represents a season and opens with a feature story on the most important event of the year. Along the bottom of each page, a timeline lists other significant moments on and off the ice.

The Hockey Chronicle celebrates the talent and passion of generations of hockey players, coaches, managers, and visionaries who battled for secure footing in the slipperiest of sports. Readers can relive historical events such as the birth of the Stanley Cup, the U.S. hockey team's Miracle on Ice, and the legendary feats of players like Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull, Wayne Gretzky, and hundreds of others.

The Hockey Chronicle is a must-have for any hockey fan. Features include:

The showdown between the NHL team owners and the players has been brewing for years.

The owners claim they lose millions of dollars annually due to escalating player salaries courtesy of free agency, and threaten to lock the players out of NHL arenas for the entire 2004–2005 season if they don’t accept a salary cap.

For their part, the players are dubious about the owners’ claims of financial ruin. They’ ve heard that song before. They believed it when it wasn’ t true: as a result, for many years hockey players earned by far the lowest salaries of major league athletes. Now that they’ve surpassed National Football League salaries, even if they still trail their contemporaries in basketball and baseball, NHL players are reluctant to give back their hard–fought gains. They want to keep the free market system and they point out that nobody forces owners to pay inflated salaries for free agents.

The last time push came to shove in this dispute a decade ago, the owners canceled half the season without getting the "cost certainty" they are still seeking. This time they’ re promising to wipe out the entire year, with the result that many players are signing on to play with European teams this season. Could this be the death of the NHL?

In this wonderful retrospective, we see how Gretzky saved the game of hockey in Los Angeles and allowed the NHL to move its base from the frozen tundra of the Great White North to the Sun Belt of Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California. While that may seem like a stretch, it's not difficult to see Gretzky's impact on the next generation of stars arriving. And the best way to analyze these up-and-comers is through the eyes of the Great One. Gretzky examines the styles of the game's rising young stars, including Detroit's Sergei Federov, Colorado's Peter Forsberg, Pittsburgh's Jaromir Jagr, Anaheim's Teemu Selanne and Paul Kariya, Philadelphia's John LeClair, Dallas's Mike Modano, Toronto's Mats Sundin, Phoenix's Jeremy Roenick and Keith Tkachuk, and New York Islander Zigmund Palffy.

This video is an offensive hockey fan's dream, with clips of exciting goals, passes, and teamwork. In NHL parlance, this video shoots and scores. --Gordie Sholtys

VHS Tape: Color, NTSC
Company: USA Home Entertainment (2000-04-18)
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