A Short History of Hockey Tape

Hockey sticks have gone from carved hardwood to aluminum to carbon fibre. The tape wrapped around them has changed far less. That’s the first thing to know about the history of hockey tape: it’s a quiet one. Nobody recorded the first player to wrap a blade, and most of what we know comes from the sticks themselves, from a few interviews, and from the people who tried to replace tape and mostly failed.

Here is what the record supports. Where it runs thin, we say so.

Borrowed from the electrician’s kit

The earliest hockey tape wasn’t made for hockey. Friction tape is a woven cotton cloth soaked in rubber-based adhesive, tacky on both sides. Electricians used it to wrap wire splices, and it was also wrapped on tennis racquets, baseball bats and hockey sticks to improve grip. PVC electrical tape later replaced it for most electrical work.

We could not find a reliable source that dates the first use of tape on a hockey stick, or names who did it. What we can show is what surviving sticks look like.

The black tape era

Sticks of the Original Six era are mostly black. An early-1960s Gordie Howe game-used stick, a Northland Pro sold by Classic Auctions, still carries its original black tape on both the blade and the handle, with puck marks on both sides of the blade.

The sticks underneath were changing. NHL.com traces the first ice hockey sticks to the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia in the 1830s. Blades stayed flat until the 1960s, when Stan Mikita and Bobby Hull began using curved “banana blades” in games, although the Rangers’ Andy Bathgate later said he had used curves since he was a boy. Ingenium, which runs Canada’s national science and technology museums, notes that fibreglass began wrapping wooden blades in the 1950s.

Not everyone wanted much tape. In his memoir Orr: My Story, Bobby Orr says he liked the feel of the puck on a bare blade. He believed a rule required some tape, so he used as little as he could, eventually just a single strand.

Full blades, powder and paint

By the early 1980s the full tape job had its most famous advocate. Sports Illustrated reported in 1982 that Wayne Gretzky taped his blade all the way from toe to heel, as Bobby Hull had, and rubbed baby powder into it to take away the tackiness. Gretzky also told SI he hadn’t taped his blade in his first NHL season, and that the puck kept sliding off his stick. You can read more about that ritual in our player stories.

The Washington Capitals Virtual Hockey Museum, which catalogues game-used sticks from the club’s history, shows how varied the 1980s were:

• Big knobs. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, many players built large tape knobs to keep the stick in their hands. Mike Gartner used two.
• Minimal knobs. By the mid-1980s, Bengt Gustafsson and Bobby Carpenter used just a thin ring of tape at the end of the handle.
• No blade tape at all. Gustafsson was still leaving his blade bare in 1987-88, one of the few who did.
• Paint instead of tape. Guy Charron painted his blade black in the late 1970s to make the puck harder for goalies to see, and the museum says many players of the era did the same.

For the names of these knob builds, see our knob styles.

White cloth takes over

By the late 1990s white cloth tape was everywhere. A Steve Yzerman game-used Easton from Detroit’s back-to-back Cup years has a white cloth wrap on the blade and red cloth tape over white on the handle, the team’s colours.

This was also the decade sticks changed underneath the tape. Ingenium says the NHL made aluminum sticks legal in 1981 and that the first carbon fibre composite blade arrived in 1995. A Minnesota Wild feature on the team’s stick room described what that meant for equipment staff: wooden sticks needed sanding, shaving, heating and bending, while composites arrive with the lie, flex and curve built in. Preparing one is mostly a matter of cutting it to length and taping it.

The rulebook never got in the way. NHL Rule 10.1 allows adhesive tape of any colour, anywhere on the stick, to reinforce it or improve puck control. That freedom is why colours, patterns and causes could later turn up on NHL sticks. The biggest example, Pride Tape, has its own story.

Attempts to replace the roll

Hand-winding tape is fiddly, and people have tried to engineer it away.

In 1997, B. Douglas Ford filed a Canadian patent application, later granted in the United States in 2001, for a one-piece adhesive sheet that would cover the blade in panels. His application pointed out that winding tape is hard for young children and for people with arthritis.

In 2011, the B.C. government profiled Blade Tape, a Richmond company led by Richard Findlay. Its product started life as a mountain bike inner tube and was made at first in a friend’s garage. Findlay’s pitch was that most hockey equipment had been upgraded while tape hadn’t changed in about a century.

That same year, The Leafs Nation spotted game-used Phil Kessel sticks with a clear, grippy rubber coating from Bauer laid on the shaft in the candy-cane swirl Kessel normally made with tape. The writer noted it wasn’t something consumers could buy.

Zdeno Chara made the same argument as Findlay. He told NHL.com in 2023 that hockey tape hadn’t really been innovated in more than 100 years. He invested in Rezztek, a stick-on blade grip, and by 2018 had stopped using blade tape altogether. He disliked retaping after skates and slashes tore it, and said the sticker saved him time between periods.

Do stickers work better than tape? One small study is worth knowing about. A team led by Slovak physicist Martin Plesch compared Renfrew cloth tape with a Specter blade sticker on the sticks of 12 players, from amateurs to NHL pros. They measured small average gains in shot speed with the sticker, about 2 to 3 percent. They also noted the limits: few shots per player, shooting from a mat rather than ice, and the sticker always tested second.

Players still improvise

Even now, players reach outside the tape aisle. New Jersey’s Dawson Mercer has used electrical tape on his handle since he was a boy in Newfoundland, because it doesn’t wear through his gloves. That’s a curious echo of where hockey tape started.

Where that leaves the roll

The record suggests a few things. Black cloth came first. White cloth became the standard by the 1990s. Grip coatings, stick-on blades and electrical tape have found a place without replacing the roll. The tape in your bag is a descendant of the friction tape in an electrician’s kit, and it has outlasted every stick it was ever wrapped around.

For today’s options, from cloth and grip to clear and sock tape, see our tape types guide. One safety note that applies in every era: tape is not a repair. If a stick is cracked, retire it rather than taping over the damage.