Evolution of Hockey Gear

It's remarkable how little equipment the hockey players of the past wore and how historic the gear they did have truly was. In the beginning, skates consisted of blades that were attached to shoes, and hockey sticks were made from tree branches. The first goalie shin and knee pads had originally been designed for the game of cricket. The quality of the gear has developed over the years, with top quality hockey skates being made and players wearing protective gloves. Shin guards eventually came into being, yet many times they didn't do much to soften the blow of a puck or stick on the shins, and players were known to stuff newspaper or magazines behind their shin guards for extra protection. 

Until the 1950s the hockey sticks were completely straight, but New York Rangers star Andy Bathgate began experimenting with a curved stick in the late 1950s. During a European tour for the Ranger's  and Blackhawk's teams, Bathgate showed his innovation to Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita, and they began experimenting and playing with a curved hockey stick and it wasn't long before most of the NHL players had followed suit. 

Goalies played without face masks until 1959, when Jacques Plante wore a face protector at a  hockey game in the original Madison Square Gardens after he had taken a puck in the cheekbone from  a shot off the stick of Andy Bathgate. Plante's coach, Toe Blake, pressured him to shed the mask later on, and he did for a while. But he started wearing the mask again the following spring, and other goaltenders eventually followed suit. But it wasn't until 1973 that an NHL netminder (journeyman Andy Brown) appeared in a game without a goalie mask for the last time. 

Players didn't begin wearing hockey helmets with any sort of regularity until the early 1970s; prior to that the only people who wore helmets did so mostly because they were recovering from a head injury. The League finally passed a rule prior to the start of the 1979-80 season saying that any player who came into the NHL from that point on had to wear a helmet. By the early 1990s there were only a few players left who did not wear a helmet, and the last one to do so was Craig MacTavish, who retired after the 1996-97 season.
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