Hockey Tape Fun Facts: Firsts, Records and Odd Uses

Hockey tape is cheap, ordinary and everywhere. It also has a better back story than most of the gear in your bag. Every fact here is sourced. Where the record runs out, we say so.

Origins

• It started in the toolbox. Friction tape, woven cotton soaked in rubber adhesive, was an electrician’s tape. Wikipedia’s article on it lists hockey sticks, tennis racquets and baseball bats among its grip uses.
• Nobody knows who taped the first stick. We could not find a reliable source naming the first player or dating the first taped blade. If you see a confident answer online, ask for the source. Our history of hockey tape covers what the surviving sticks show.
• Taped blades were on film by 1938. Wikipedia’s inline hockey article describes 1938 footage of roller hockey players using ice hockey sticks with taped blades.

The tape makers

• A hockey town makes the tape. Renfrew Pro has made tape in Renfrew, Ontario, since 1980. The town’s own team, the Renfrew Millionaires, was founded by Michael John O’Brien and his son Ambrose, who went on to found the National Hockey Association in 1909, the league that led to the NHL. Renfrew Pro was bought by Scapa Group in 1995.
• The first plastic shin pad tape. Renfrew Pro says it was the first company to make polyethylene shin pad tape, in 1985. That line is now called Polyflex.
• Stanley Cup dressing rooms. Renfrew Pro says its tape has been the choice of every Stanley Cup champion for more than 20 years running. That is the company’s own claim; we have not seen independent confirmation.
• Winnipeg, 1969. Lowry Sports says it was established in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1969.
• A college player’s side project. Howies was started in 2002 by Howie Sieplinga while he played ACHA hockey at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Howies says the New York Islanders were the first NHL team to buy it.
• Built for composites. North American Tapes in Watertown, New York, makes Comp-O-Stik tape. It says its founders developed their adhesive to stick to carbon fibre and graphite as sticks moved away from wood.

Numbers

• 9,000 rolls. Renfrew Pro’s minimum order for a custom-printed stick tape is 9,000 rolls of 24 mm by 18 m tape. Tape makers do not publish total sales, and we could not find a reliable figure for how many rolls are sold in Canada or the US each year.
• 1,600 sticks. Carolina Hurricanes equipment manager Nick Roy said in 2023 that the team plans on one stick per player per game. With about 20 players over 82 games, that is more than 1,600 sticks a season.
• 2 to 3 percent. A small study led by physicist Martin Plesch compared cloth tape with a stick-on blade grip on 12 players’ sticks. It measured average shot-speed gains of about 2 to 3 percent with the grip, and listed the study’s limits. It is one small study, not a verdict.

Records and extremes

• The biggest tape ball weighs 2,000 lb. Guinness World Records lists the largest tape ball at 907.18 kg (2,000 lb), with a circumference of 3.89 m. The Portland Promise Center in Louisville, Kentucky, made it, and it was measured on May 6, 2011. It mixes duct, electrical, masking, packing, athletic and other tapes. It is not a hockey tape ball. We could not find a documented record for one made only of hockey tape. More in tape balls.
• The least tape. Bobby Orr liked a bare blade. In his memoir he says he thought a rule required some tape, so he used as little as possible, in the end a single strand.
• No tape at all. Wayne Gretzky told Sports Illustrated in 1982 that he did not tape his blade in his first NHL season, and pucks kept sliding off his stick. He switched to a full blade, rubbed with baby powder.
• The rule that allows almost anything. NHL Rule 10.1 lets skaters wrap tape of any colour anywhere on the stick. The only tape-specific rule is the goalie’s white knob. See NHL rules on stick tape.

Odd uses

• Saving gloves. New Jersey’s Dawson Mercer uses smooth electrical tape at the top of his stick, a habit from Newfoundland. He told NJD.tv in 2022 it stops his glove palms wearing through. Fifty-one games into that season he was still in his summer gloves.
• A round handle. Carolina’s equipment manager said Dylan Coghlan put fibreglass in the handle, then wrapped it with gauze and grip tape until the top of the stick was round, like a baseball bat.
• A giant knob. Vegas captain Mark Stone builds a very large knob from hockey tape and medical tape. Scouting The Refs checked it against Rule 10.1 in 2023 and found it legal.
• A headband. Renfrew Pro’s catalogue suggests its foam under-wrap can be used as a headband or to hold ice packs in place.

People who tried to replace it

• A one-piece sheet, 1997. B. Douglas Ford applied for a patent on an adhesive sheet that covers the blade in panels. His application said winding tape is hard for young children and for people with arthritis.
• A bike tube, 2011. The B.C. government profiled Blade Tape, a Richmond company whose product began as a mountain bike inner tube, made at first in a friend’s garage.

The roll survived both. For what you can buy today, see types of hockey tape compared.