 One call that you'll probably see made multiple times during any hockey game is a team being called offside The basic rule for remaining onside is that the puck must cross the blue line Into the attacking zone before the players do if a player enters before the puck Then play is stopped and there is a face-off at one of these dots by the blue line It would be nice to say that that was the complete role and we could stop here But it does get a little more in-depth than that. So let's go and get a full rundown on what it means to be offside What about the blue line itself? Is it inside or outside of the zone? Well, yes, most often this will come into play when the puck is already in the zone And say the a team is on the power play and the puck is passed back and a player stops it right on top of the line In real life the line is much wider than the puck itself But you get the idea in this case the play is considered onside And the players can stay in the zone and play will continue as far as a player's body is concerned though As long as one of his skates is on top of the line He is considered outside of the zone So say one skate is in the attacking zone and the other one is on the blue line And then when his teammate who has the puck brings the puck across the line and into the zone And then our guy who's straddling the line enters the zone This play is also onside and can continue The third situation where this would come into play is if a player carries the puck into the zone backwards Which is to say his skates go in first and then he pulls the puck in after If in the referees judgment he does in fact feel that this player who's carrying the puck has possession of the puck This is also an onside play and the ref will let play continue The next thing to consider is a situation called delayed offside Which means that the play is technically offside But in certain cases the referees are allowed to let that slide to a point Let's say here that we have two green guys bringing the puck in and so they've got a two on two They enter the zone on side the puck first and then the players But as soon as the guy with the puck gets into the zone This orange defender steps up and he immediately takes the puck and shoots it out of the zone The puck bounces off the boards right here to another green guy who immediately dumps the puck right back into the zone So at this point right now the two green guys in the zone are technically Offside because they were in the zone before the puck came in This is where the delayed offside comes into play and the rule basically states that if the two green guys in The zone immediately recognized they are offside and they do not try to go get the puck Then the play will continue in order to get back on side They must skate to the blue line and basically tag up So once they have touched the blue line They are once again considered onside and they can skate back into the zone and go after the puck The last thing we'll look at is an intentional offside Which doesn't happen all that often, but it's probably good to know it just in case it does So this part of the rule says that if a team in the referees judgment goes offside on purpose for whatever reason so in this example one of our players is clearly in the attacking zone and His teammate shoots the puck in any way or passes it to him anyway Then the referee can call this an intentional offside and rather than having a faceoff right outside the zone The faceoff will be held back down in their own defensive zone So now you know how the offside call works puck first then you can cross the line