Colorado Avalanche coach Bob Hartley kept a close eye on his

Rolex during the Stanley Cup finals last June. If the minutes

seemed like hours, it was not because he wasn't having a grand

time--which he was--but because he was playing his top three

defensemen to the point of exhaustion and was trying to secure

every moment of rest he could for Rob Blake, Raymond Bourque and

Adam Foote. Face-offs became filibusters as Colorado dawdled

before draws as if it were playing baseball. "Bob would call up

the lines on the bench and say, 'Wait, wait,'" says Avalanche

center Joe Sakic. "Then we'd wait for the linesman to come and

get us, and then we'd skate out real slow. Or Bob would tell me

to talk to the goalie, so I'd go out there, circle Patrick Roy,

and finally talk to him, which would force the linesman to yell

at me."

Hartley's four-corners face-off strategy was an effective if not

terribly creative exercise of hockey's notorious black arts. His

method wasn't nearly as daring as the one used last spring by

former New York Islanders coach Bill Stewart, who delayed a

German league playoff game by feigning a heart attack behind the

bench. Or even as daring as the stunt performed by Detroit Red

Wings goalie Chris Osgood on April 1, 1995, when he pulled one

of the greatest snow jobs in NHL history. As a steamy Reunion

Arena buzzed in anticipation of a penalty shot by the Dallas

Stars' Dave Gagner, Osgood skated from his crease to one of the

hash marks 20 feet in front of the net, pushing a pile of slush

with his stick, as unhurried as a pensioner clearing his

driveway. He deposited the slush, returned to the goal and

proceeded to the other hash mark with more slush. In front of

all those eyewitnesses, Osgood had built a pair of snowbanks,

the equivalent of sticking up a 7-Eleven while wearing a HELLO!

MY NAME IS...tag. In the NHL, in which boundaries are tested as

routinely as interstate speed limits, Osgood didn't break a

rule; he merely took the spirit of sportsmanship and kneed it in

the groin. The befuddled Gagner never got the shot away, the

puck dying in Osgood's man-made moguls.

The black arts in hockey--either blatant cheating or massaging

the rules, depending on your point of view--have been pushed

deeper underground since Osgood's twin peaks. NHL Miss Grundys

have cracked down on monkey business with new lines in the

face-off circles that deter players from stealing draws, with

tie-down jerseys that keep fighters from shedding their sweaters

to gain an advantage and with increased scrutiny of the size of

a goalie's equipment. Wary of league punishment, fighters no

longer grease their jerseys with Vaseline or silicone to keep an

opponent from getting a grip during a scrap. Skate-blade-dulling

screws no longer protrude from the floor around the visitors'

bench in Pittsburgh. On the surface it seems that righteousness

rules, but the black arts are still being practiced with

impunity by players savvy enough to test the limits. "The best

players always are on the edge of the rules," Minnesota Wild

assistant coach Mike Ramsey says. "[Defensemen like] Rob Blake,

Chris Pronger, Al MacInnis, Chris Chelios--they'll hack and

slash and chop to the limit. Sometimes beyond."

The Stick

When he was coach of the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, Craig

Hartsburg grew livid over the possibility that the Avalanche had

used improper means to catch his players using illegal sticks in

a December 1999 match at the Pepsi Center in Denver. After the

Avalanche successfully challenged the legality of the lumber

being wielded by Ducks Teemu Selanne and Dominic Roussel within

66 seconds (both players were assessed minor penalties because

their blades were either too wide or had a bigger curve than

allowed), Hartsburg contended Colorado must have pulled an

inside job because a door in the Avalanche's dressing room

connected to the visitors' room. "If we cheated with illegal

sticks," Hartsburg said, "somebody cheated and came in and

checked our sticks."

For all of Hartsburg's indignation, coaches routinely designate

a trainer or an equipment man to eyeball opponents' gear or

swipe and measure sticks broken during a rival team's morning

skate, information that might pay off when a power play is

desperately needed. Indeed, Toronto Maple Leafs coach Pat Quinn

says 300 players, more than 40% of those in the league, use

illegal sticks. There's a priceless moment in the 1998

documentary The New Ice Age--A Year in the Life of the NHL in

which Stars winger Brett Hull shouts down the bench at an

equipment man, "I need my legal stick. I need my legal stick."

A stick challenge is rarely made before the final minutes of a

match--if a coach is wrong, his club is assessed a delay of game

penalty--but Hartley gambled midway through the third period in

that game against Anaheim because Colorado trailed by two goals.

Says Detroit associate coach Dave Lewis, "Everybody knows to

switch [to a legal stick] with five minutes left. That's stupid."

The Goalie

Having grown up in the era of explosive offense, goalies have

sought comfort in the world of hockey fashion. Until 1998-99,

when the league dispatched former goalie Dave Dryden to police

goaltenders' equipment, many netminders sported leg pads three

inches wider than specifications permit (12 inches is the

current limit) and wore jerseys so amply cut they would have

been hanging on the Michelin Man. Goalies especially favored

extra cloth in the sleeves of their sweaters. If the jersey was

held tight by Velcro at the wrist, then when a goalie raised his

arm, the material draping from it would form a taut, triangular

web that could practically repel a puck and certainly would

allow a shooter to see less of the net.

"But they still don't measure the equipment when it's on you,"

former goalie Brian Hayward says. "A goalie could take pads that

measure 12 inches wide and pound them with a stick or step on

them and make them 13 1/2, even 14 inches. Until they start

measuring the pads on you, you can fiddle with the width. You

can also do things with the depth. You wear thicker leg

pads--there's no rule on thickness--and if you're turned

sideways, you take up more space."

A goaltender, as Osgood demonstrated, can take cold comfort in

snow--especially late in periods, when the ice deteriorates. If

it escapes the attention of officials and cruising forwards, a

nicely constructed mound at the goalpost can foil a pass through

the crease or a wraparound shot. One Eastern Conference

goaltender says he even builds piles inside the posts in the

hope they might stop a puck from trickling over the goal line.



Stalling

In 17-plus NHL seasons Chelios, a Detroit defenseman, often has

been called wild. When Chelios chats up an official, he turns

into Oscar Wilde, a conversationalist of considerable wit if not

brevity. "He'll skate over, question a call, maybe ask how the

summer went," Lewis says. "For a guy with Chelios's style, he's

got a pretty good rapport with the refs."

Chelios isn't interested in chitchat as much as he is a rest.

The options for grinding the game to a halt are plentiful: a

goalie surreptitiously undoing straps on his pads; a phantom

injury; an intentionally broken stick; and sneaky coaches

tossing nickels and other coins onto the ice to delay a

face-off. ("You have to know what coins you're tossing," says a

former coach of a Canadian team. "The refs find Canadian coins

in a U.S. rink, they know you did it.")

There's also that old standby, the phony stick exchange. "You

skate over to the equipment guy, hand him your stick [as if it's

broken] and then tell him to give you the same stick back," says

Detroit winger Brendan Shanahan. "A classic."

Then there's this Coke classic, which helped Toronto in the

first round of the 1996 playoffs against the St. Louis Blues.

Back then television timeouts were called by a TV producer, not

regulated by the league. A Leafs assistant coach persuaded a

sympathetic telecaster to move his soft-drink cup to the edge of

the booth whenever the producer passed the word through the

announcer's earpiece that a TV timeout was imminent. The

Coke-on-the-ledge gambit tipped off the Toronto assistant in the

adjacent booth, who would walkie-talkie the information to the

bench. The Leafs had the luxury of putting their best line on

the ice knowing it soon would get a rest and be ready for

another shift following the timeout.

The Defenseman

In the privacy of a deserted locker room, a veteran Eastern

Conference defenseman stands before a reporter, knees slightly

bent, choreographing the moves of the NHL miscreant with great

deliberation, as if he were teaching the cha-cha to a

particularly dense pupil. "See, you can get away with

cross-checking a guy, but you have to do it with one arm, almost

like a punch," he explains. His right hand flies out while his

left hand stays flush to his chest, the imaginary stick whacking

the imaginary forward at a 45-degree angle. "Extend both arms

and referees will get you, but this is in tight where they have

trouble seeing. It's like the butt end."

His top hand now slides six inches down the shaft of the

imaginary stick. "A guy tries to get by, your hand goes down,

and you have a few inches of butt end you can either stick under

his armpit or get tangled in his sweater. That stops him.

Usually it's in the corner, where there are lots of bodies. It's

impossible to spot."

"For a defenseman it's all timing," says Ramsey, the Wild

assistant and 18-year NHL veteran. "Everybody expects you to

hold. The key is to know when to let go. To give the little tug

that disrupts the timing of the play but goes unnoticed."

The Fighters

The 1996-97 implementation of the so-called Rob Ray rule--which

handicaps players like Rob Ray, the Buffalo Sabres' enforcer

who, when a fight began, could shed his top faster than Brandi

Chastain--has darkened most cruiserweights' careers.

Unencumbered by bulky sweaters (and more important, by not

giving Goliaths anything to grab during fisticuffs), smaller

fighters often could successfully duke it out with bigger men.

Now, with tied-down jerseys, these fighters are reduced to

notching or otherwise roughing up the plastic of their helmets,

stunts that can leave an indelible reminder on a puncher's

knuckles but smack of tawdriness.

Ray, however, says fighters still have at least one trick up

their sleeves: Elbow pads. "If you know you're going to fight,

leave your elbow pads on the bench," Ray says. "That leaves you

a lot freer. Refs are always checking the sweater to make sure

it's tied down so you can't slip your arm out of it and punch.

But they aren't looking to see if you've got elbow pads."

The Face-off

Even with the lines, drawn in 1996-97, that oblige centers to

stand square in the circles, injured Calgary center Jeff Shantz

says, "face-offs are won and lost mostly by whoever cheats the

best." Because the visiting player must put his blade on the ice

first, a dawdling home-team center can take time to discuss the

draw--or the weather--with teammates positioned around the

circle. This tends either to freeze or agitate the other center.

"When the home guy delays, you know the linesman will drop the

puck quickly when that guy finally gets in, because he wants to

get the game going," says Minnesota general manager Doug

Risebrough, an NHL center for 13 seasons. "As the home center

you're coming in with motion. That'll win a lot of draws."

The Line Change

The NHL plays five-on-five hockey except a) when penalties

intervene, b) in overtime and c) when Dallas is changing penalty

killers on the fly. The Stars might be shorthanded, but at times

it looks as if they have at least six skaters on the ice,

mocking not only the five-foot rule--a player isn't permitted on

the ice until a teammate coming out of the game is within five

feet of the bench--but also the man advantage. "That's nothing

more than a combination of alert, veteran players and good

coaching," Lewis says. "Say we're coming out of our zone, and

one of their penalty killers is chasing over the blue line.

Maybe we beat that guy, but then he hustles toward the bench and

another guy jumps on from the other end. You think you have a

three-on-two developing, but that kills it. They're coming in

one door and going out the other."

The Building

One final story: During the 1999 Western Conference finals,

Colorado was greeted in the visitors' dressing room at Joe Louis

Arena by the pungent smell of fresh paint. Although Detroit

management insisted the ill-timed paint job (not to mention the

accompanying noxious fumes) was part of routine building

maintenance, Avalanche suspicions about the spring cleaning

settled on Red Wings master artist and coach Scotty Bowman. So

don't despair, all you jersey-tuggers, stick-switchers, face-off

swindlers and heart-attack fakers. Even in this seemingly dim

age, the black arts come in a rainbow of Sherwin-Williams colors.

FOUR COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS: ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARNOLD ROTH

Coaches routinely designate someone to eyeball opponents' gear

in hopes that the inside info will pay off with a crucial power

play.

A goalie can easily construct a mound of ice around the goal

which can foil a pass through the crease or a wraparound shot.

"You have to know what coins you're tossing," says a former

Canadian team coach. "The refs find Canadian coins in a U.S.

rink, they know you did it."