From Percival to Tarasov

The Canadian origins of Soviet hockey

Anatoly Tarasov and I share a common past.

Not only are we both born in and molded by a communist country (USSR for him, PRC for me), but our thinking is influcenced by the same book, Lloyd Percival’s The Hockey Handbook.

Tarasov read the original 1951 edition “like a schoolboy,” while I discovered hockey, as a schoolboy, through a 1992 second edition fro…