Fights down 48% in Ontario Hockey League
Fighting in the Ontario Hockey League is heading the way of the wooden stick and the leather skate boot.
According to OHL statistics the number of fights has dropped 48 per cent from last year. This year the OHL decreased the fightthreshold leading to a suspension from 10 fights to three fights.
According to hockeyfight.com the Petes had 131 fights in the 199798 season. Five years later, in 200203 that number had dropped to 68 bouts. In 2007-08 it rose slightly to 75 but in 2012-13 it dropped to 47 and this season it currently stands at 16.
Often the top performing teams are also the most fight-prone. The London Knight had 141 fights 10 years ago, 34 fights last season, during their latest Memorial Cup season and so-far this season 10.
Over the 61 years I have attended junior A hockey games, 25 of which as a scout, the emphasis of fighting has slowly dissipated. In the 1950’s and 1960’s fighting was commonplace and line brawls and team brawls were a regular occurrence.
Roger Neilson, who started his coaching here in Peterborough in 1967 and went on to a Hall of Fame career in the NHL, was often criticized for the emphasis he put on physical play. Roger always had a number of players on his roster who were not at all reluctant to drop the gloves. It was just the way it was in the OHL in those days; all teams had their enforcers.
Winning teams relied as much on intimidation as they did skill. It was essentially the same attitude in the NHL. When I started scouting in 1981 a player’s ability to fight was one of a few skill-sets we included in our evaluations. It was not as much how well he fought as how willing he was to play physical realizing that often led to a fight.
Later on a player’s physical tendencies were noted but the more valued skills of puck handling, hockey sense and skating outweighed them. Terms like “gritty, tenacious, with sandpaper” started to show up in scouting reports shunting aside toughness and fighting.
When David Branch took over as commissioner of the OHL in 1979 his concerns of the fighting trends in the junior game became evident. Under Branch, brawling in the OHL was severely punished with suspensions to players and coaches and fines to teams essentially putting an end to it. The overly aggressive players with limited hockey skills that relied on fighting to stay in the league gradually became liabilities not assets.
In those years there were concerns with scouts the OHL was impeding the development of players for the NHL with their rules against fights. That is not evident today. In last June’s NHL Entry Draft, 70 per cent of the selections came from leagues with no fighting or stringent fight rules; the most, 22 per cent, were selected from the OHL.
The OHL has definitely led the way in eliminating fighting in Canada. Their stringent rules meshed with the growing social negativity towards fights in all of hockey. Since the 2010-11 NHL season there has been a 48 per cent drop in the number of fights essentially because of greater concussion awareness, the untimely deaths of some former NHL fighters and the growing social revulsion to hockey fights.
There will still be fights in hockey, as there are in baseball, basketball, football, lacrosse and even in soccer and NASCAR. But, it is just a matter of time that fighting in hockey will be punished by immediate expulsions from the game like most other sports.
And it is not lost on observers, this season’s outstanding crop of NHL rookies mainly came from leagues that have little or no fighting.