Gretzky, Baby Powder and Hockey's Strangest Tape Rituals

In December 1982, Sports Illustrated named Wayne Gretzky its Sportsman of the Year and spent part of the profile on something most readers had never thought about: his tape. Gretzky taped his blade all the way from toe to heel, as Bobby Hull had, and then rubbed baby powder into it to kill the tackiness. Without the powder, he told SI, “the puck feels sluggish on the stick.” He also believed the tape’s cushion took the spin off pucks coming hard off the boards. And he said that in his first NHL season he hadn’t used blade tape at all, and pucks kept sliding off his stick.

It’s the most famous tape ritual in hockey, and it’s far from the strangest. Here is what we could document, with the sources to back it up. For the full catalogue of player tape jobs, see our player stories.

The baby powder line

The powder habit has unusually good paper. SI tied it to Hull in 1982. The Globe and Mail later added a detail from the Oilers dressing room: Gretzky had the equipment manager carry a supply of baby powder, which he sprinkled on his taped sticks.

The trick hasn’t died. Vancouver’s Quinn Hughes told the North Shore News that when his grip tape gets sticky against his glove and he can’t move his hand freely, he puts baby powder on it. If that doesn’t fix it, he changes the tape on his knob. He also uses a new stick every game. That’s three documented generations, Hull, Gretzky and Hughes, using the same household product for the same reason: fresh tape can be too sticky.

Surf wax, and other things that aren’t hockey products

Hockey wax exists. Some players don’t trust it.

Ethen Frank of the Washington Capitals coats his blade with Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax, a surfboard wax made to keep surfers on their boards. He told The Hockey News in 2025 that it’s a little stickier than hockey wax, that it keeps snow off his tape, and that it slows down a puck spinning off the boards, the same problem Gretzky described in 1982. He has used the setup since high school. At Western Michigan, an equipment manager told him a former player used to melt the wax before applying it. Now Frank and his girlfriend melt it in a double boiler at home and pour it into cupcake moulds. On game days he spreads it on with a heat gun.

New Jersey’s Dawson Mercer uses electrical tape, not hockey tape, at the top of his stick, where his hand grips. He’s done it since he was a kid in Newfoundland. The smooth surface keeps the palms of his gloves from wearing through, and 51 games into the 2021-22 season he was still in the gloves he’d worn that summer. He packed extra rolls from home when he moved to New Jersey. The Devils’ equipment staff found a close match from 3M for the inner layers so he wouldn’t run out of his own.

If you’re curious about the real thing, our tape types guide covers cloth, grip and wax.

Rituals that are about time, not tape

For some players the tape itself matters less than when and how it goes on.

Sidney Crosby told CBS Pittsburgh in 2017 that he tapes his stick a particular way at the same time before every game. Asked to list his superstitions, he said there were too many. Teammate Justin Schultz said Crosby was probably the most superstitious player on the team.

Marc Savard was so particular that he retaped teammates’ sticks when he didn’t like how they’d done them. On the 31 Thoughts podcast in 2018, he told the story of redoing former teammate Jason York’s sticks. After he retired, NBC Sports reported, he started posting YouTube videos recreating other NHL players’ tape jobs.

When changing the tape changes the night

Tape rituals often start with a good game.

Jan Drozg, then a Penguins prospect, copied Artemi Panarin’s two-tone look before the 2019 World Championship. He scored four points in his first game with it and four more in the next, and kept it. He told DK Pittsburgh Sports that the tape doesn’t help him on the ice and that it’s mostly mental. He also said he changes his tape job a lot.

Ryan Johansen ran the experiment in reverse. At a summer golf tournament, Wayne Gretzky and Brett Hull gave him tips on how to tape his stick. He tried their way and went about 15 games without a goal. He switched back to his own half-blade white tape job and scored in his first game back. His conclusion, on the Predators’ podcast in 2022, was that the method suited them better than him.

Ottawa’s Tim Stützle made his change between periods. In October 2025 he had fumbled the puck for two periods against Boston, and assistant coach Daniel Alfredsson had been after him to change his tape. Before the third, he wrapped the whole blade in white, heavier than usual. He scored twice and the Senators won 7-2.

The stick, not the tape

Some of hockey’s best-known stick rituals involve no tape at all.

Bruce Gardiner, mired in a scoring slump, marched his stick into the washroom and tried to flush the blade down the toilet. According to The Globe and Mail, he scored, and afterward never started a game without a trip to the toilet first. The same article says Oilers players had to slam the butt ends of their sticks into a steel door outside the video room, and that Phil Esposito got upset if anyone crossed sticks in the dressing room.

Corey Perry’s version uses a garbage can. Former teammate Kevin Bieksa told the Missin Curfew podcast that when Perry was in a slump, he stood his stick in the garbage in the middle of the room before games and had teammates throw trash on it, calling for a garbage goal. Perry confirmed it and said the habit goes back a long way.

Alex Ovechkin’s best stick story was a joke. In the 2011-12 season, after new Capitals coach Dale Hunter called him a plumber, Ovechkin attached a toilet plunger to his stick and wore it through a few practice drills. He told the Empty Netters podcast in 2026 that it was all in fun.

The Minnesota Wild once collected a few older stories from its own dressing room. A Wild feature on the team’s stick room said Dave Andreychuk carried a wooden stick from his rookie season for about 18 years and used it as the template for cutting new sticks, and that Alexandre Daigle used a knob the size of a bagel, a habit from his peewee days.

Why the rituals stick around

Read enough of these stories and a pattern shows up. Players rarely claim their ritual makes the puck do something it otherwise wouldn’t. Drozg says it’s mental. Johansen’s lesson was that someone else’s method didn’t fit him. Gretzky and Frank are the exceptions: both gave a physical reason, about tackiness and spin, and both reached for something from outside the hockey shop to solve it.

The rest is confidence. If a fresh tape job, a dusting of powder or a stick in the garbage can settles a player before a game, that’s reason enough to keep doing it.

Want to recreate a famous tape job? Try it in the Tape Lab, or read more hockey superstitions in our lore section.