Defenceman
position in ice hockey
Defenceman or defense (in American English) in ice hockey is a player position that is primarily responsible for preventing the opposing team from scoring. They are often referred to as defencemen, D, D-men or blueliners (the last a reference to the blue line in ice hockey which represents the boundary of the offensive zone; defencemen generally position themselves along the line to keep the puck in the zone). They were once called cover-point.
In regular play, two defencemen complement three forwards and a goaltender on the ice. Exceptions include overtime during the regular season and when a team is short-handed (i.e. has been assessed a penalty), in which two defencemen are typically joined by only two forwards and a goaltender; when a team is on the power play (i.e. the opponent has been assessed a penalty), teams will often play only one defenceman, joined by four forwards and a goaltender. In the National Hockey League's regular season play in overtime, effective with the 2015–16 season, teams usually have only three position players and a goaltender on the ice, and may use either two forwards and one defenceman, or in rare cases – two defencemen and one forward.
Historical designations
Organized play of ice hockey originates from the first indoor game in Montreal in 1875. In subsequent years, the number of players per side was reduced to seven.
“Defenceman” enters the record as position in ice hockey. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Defenceman, position and hockey can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2304909. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2015 and 1875.
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This entry incorporates text from “Defenceman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.