The NHL season has officially started, which means millions of hockey fans can celebrate and enjoy their favorite teams deke, check, and shoot their way to victory. Hockey doesn’t have the same following as other major professional sports do in the United States, but it is the national sport of Canada and has pockets of passionate fans everywhere…including in the comics.
Although there aren’t too many hockey players turned superheroes, there are a few folks who look good in a goalie mask and could probably make an impact on the ice. Here are five characters who we imagine would be pretty good hockey players:
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Casey Jones
One of the few comic book characters to actually play hockey, Casey Jonesย is the human sidekick/ally of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Jones is best known for wearing an old school goalie mask to conceal his identity, as well as his occasional use of a hockey stick to beat criminals and ninja into submission.
How much time Jones actually spends on the ice varies depending on the cartoon/comic/movie. In some continuities, Jones was a professional hockey player turned vigilante after injuries derailed his career. Other times, Jones is just a sports fan with good taste in protective headwear. In IDW’s currentย Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtlesย series, Jones is a varsity hockey player at a New York city college, although his poor grades (due in part to his nighttime activities) have threatened his scholarship.ย
Regardless, Jones has remainedย an important friend of the Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles and inevitably winds up married toย April O’Neil, which basically makes him the luckiest guy in existence.ย
Wild Dog
Arrowย fans are getting acquainted with Wild Dog, a somewhat obscure DC superhero who’s best known for wearing a hockey mask and mowing down mobsters with machine guns. Wild Dog isn’t actually a hockey player by trade, but he did playย football in college. Wild Dog went into the vigilante business afterย mobsters killed his girlfriend.ย
Wild Dog is clearly a scrapper, which means he’d be a perfect fourth line grinder for a team looking to add some grit to the bench. While enforcers (hockey players that are solely on a team to fight) are a dying breed, Wild Dog would also gladly drop the gloves to go after anyone who he feels has wronged one of his teammates.
Sportsmaster
DC doesn’t have any professional hockey players turned superheroes, but they do have a master athlete…who’s also a gifted criminal. There’s been multiple Sportsmasters in the DC Universe, allย of whom are superiorย athletes turned supercriminals after they realized that burglary and theft pays better that pro sports. (Obviously, Sportsmaster was a Golden Age creation before most professional athletes were millionaires.)
Although it was never specified what sport Sportsmaster played, he did use exploding hockey pucks in his arsenal. ย Since the Sportsmaster would definitely be a complete hockey player, we’d like to think that Sportsmaster was the Gordie Howe of the DC Universe….only evil instead of a Red Wing.ย
Like the previous characters on this list, theย Young Justice version of Sportsmaster also wore a metal goalie’s mask, because those things just look scary.
Wolverine
We’ve never seen Wolverine lace up skates and take to the ice, but he is Canadian so we’d expect that he’s played pond hockey at least a few times as a kid. Any hockey player would loveย nearly indestructable bones and a healing factor, and Wolverine’s brawling abilities would also come in handy for when some idiot inevitably tries to pick a fight with him.
Since Wolverine is a good Canadian, we even know what his favorite hockey team is. As a native son of Alberta, Canada, Wolverine is a Calgary Flames fan and has even been shown wearing a Flames jersey from time to time in the comics. We’re not sure why Wolverine roots for the Flamesย over their in-province rivals Edmonton Oilers, since the Flames didn’t move to Calgary until 1980, but it’s nice to see that Wolverine has a hobby that doesn’t involve stabbing people with his claws.ย
Unus the Untouchable
Every hockey team needs a goalie and we couldn’t think of a better person to stop pucks than Unus the Untouchable. Unus the Untouchable was an early Marvel mutant who could create impenetrableย force fields around his body, making him impossible to touch.ย Provided he could keep his force fields from knocking his goal off its pegs, we’d think that any NHL team would love to Unus in between the pipes.
Unus even had a similarly powered son named Radius who might have even spent some time playing hockey. Radius grew up in a Canadianย orphanage and hockey is Canada’s national sport…so it’s easy to assume he played at least a little bit of hockey before his mutant powers kicked in. Radius went on to joinย a version of Alpha Flight and even got to fight Wolverine once before he disappeared into obscurity along with most other mutants after M-Day.
