Enforcers are thing of past in today’s NHL
Fighting steadily on decline as likes of Orr, Parros move on
On the first night of Colton Orr’s last full season in the NHL he fought George Parros, Montreal’s strapping moustachioed Ivy League enforcer, and then fought him again.
The second time Parros slipped and banged his head on the ice and tried to get up, his eyes empty; Orr, concerned, motioned for the trainer right away. They had fought two years earlier when Parros was in Anaheim, and then Orr was the one who slipped. He knew how it felt.
“It’s scary,” Orr said that night. “Ice isn’t going to give.”
Hockey doesn’t give, either. The 33year-old Orr has played just 14 games for the AHL’s Toronto Marlies this season, and has been called up by the Toronto Maple Leafs for their final game of the season as a gesture. Orr is said to be contemplating retirement. He wouldn’t be alone.
Parros is gone; most of the enforcers are gone.
Six years ago, there were 41players who fought at least 10 times, according to hockeyfights.com. The next year, 38. Then 23. After the lockout-shortened season, there were 22.
This year? Going into Thursday night’s games, seven men had fought at least 10 times: Cody McLeod of Colorado, Vancouver’s Derek Dorsett, Montreal’s Brandon Prust, Jared Boll of Columbus, Ottawa’s Mark Borowiecki, Washington’s Tom Wilson, and Antoine Roussel of Dallas. Fighting didn’t vanish this season, but for the most part, the pure enforcer did.
“I think it’s a good thing,” says Paul Bissonnette, who fought 52 times in the NHL, largely with the Phoenix Coyotes, and is currently playing for the AHL’s Manchester Monarchs. “It means guys aren’t just fighting for no reason. The days of just lining up and saying ‘hey, I’m the tough guy, you’re the tough guy, let’s do this’ . . . those days are kind of gone.”
It’s been a wave: a combination of rules (mandatory visors being phased in, the rule against removing your helmet during a fight), speed (the game is breakneck fast), and analytics (which includes a focus on puck possession, which was never a strength of the Colton Orrs of the world.) Line brawls are discouraged; bench-clearing brawls are antiques. Maybe the prospect of concussion litigation helped, or maybe not.
Regardless, there were 383 fights so far this season: there were 714 as recently as 2009-10, and 347 in the 48-game lockout-shortened season of 2012-13. The trials of fighters have been well-known for years: the last few years have offered questions about Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien, Wade Belak, Steve Montador. Enforcers were always asked to do too much.
Once it became purposeless, it became harder to defend.
“Why just have two tough guys line up and fight each other just because people might want to see it in the crowd, because that’s the way it was? No,” says Bissonnette. “But I do think fighting serves a purpose. Like if a guy like (Steve) Downie goes after (a star), what, you’ve got to let the league handle it? What if they don’t?”
The league’s skill players haven’t been all-out assaulted, other than a few not-atypical injuries; some will tell you there does seem to be an increase in face-washing, slashing, the rattling chains of agitation. But middleweights work just as well, when the heavyweights go away.
So when Orr skates off Saturday night, he’ll join the crowd. He was always a symbol of the Leafs organization believing in the old ways to
“Why just have two tough guys line up and fight each other just because people might want to see it in the crowd?” PAUL BISSONNETTE
their detriment, and he grimly suffered a certain amount of brain damage for the cause.
The Leafs, though, didn’t collapse this year because they didn’t have fighters. They collapsed because they weren’t any good. When Orr was sent down in 2012 then-GM Brian Burke passionately lamented the coming death of the enforcer. And when Orr got to the Marlies he hadn’t played in a while, following the concussion from the fall in that Parros fight.
“I remember being really concerned,” says then-Marlies coach Dallas Eakins. “It’s tough, when you’re being sat out every night, and you’re trying to be part of a team. And he wasn’t in great shape, and he wasn’t in great mental shape, either. He wasn’t real high on his game, and nor should he have been. He hadn’t played in so long.
“One of the things I told him was ‘you’ve got to be able to play, bud,’ ” says Eakins. “Everyone knows you’re tough. You might be the toughest guy in the league. But you’ve got to be able to play.”
When Eakins thinks of Orr, he doesn’t think of hockey, or the fights. He thinks of how hard Orr worked on skating, on conditioning, how professional he was, how he tried to keep younger players on the right path off the ice. Eakins was inspired by Orr, more than anything. He loved how hard Orr fought to save his career.
Of course, it was all so Orr could be in that opener in Montreal fighting Parros, hoping he wasn’t the one who slipped. The two men fought one last time two months later, squaring off, swinging hard, and as they fell Orr reached up with his left hand and tried to cradle Parros’s head before it landed.
He fought once more, a bad one, a near knockout. Orr didn’t fight in the AHL this year, and he probably won’t on Saturday, either; there’s no point anymore.
Sometimes, you wonder how much there ever was.