Goalie fights, often a crowd favorite, have almost completely disappeared
Boras struggling to find that One Dumb Owner this spring
Watching fights between Patrick Roy and Mike Vernon and Ron Hextall and Felix Potvin in the 1990s, Martin Biron recalled, he always wanted to be the goaltender who could win a bout as the spunky underdog.
Then he got into one against Ray Emery and asked himself, “What were you thinking?”
Two decades since Robert Esche and Patrick Lalime went at it as part of the Philadelphia Flyers-Ottawa Senators brawl that set the NHL record for penalty minutes, goalie fighting has essentially disappeared from the league. There has not been one since before the pandemic, and only three have taken place over the past 10 years. The disappearance of two heavily padded goalies trading blows is due to the fact there are almost no teamwide slugfests anymore, prohibitive rules and fewer netminders willing to take the risks.
“I think goalies have gotten smarter and they’re like, no, there’s no reason to get in a fight,” Biron said. “Fighting is not as prevalent as it once was, and you don’t have the kind of brawls that we used to have sometimes where you’re like, ‘OK, I’m going to join in.’”
Biron and Emery in 2007 is one of just seven goalie vs. goalie fights since the 2004-05 lockout and 43 overall dating to 1954, according to HockeyFights.com (there are 141 other times where at least one goalie was involved in a tussle). The vast majority of these unusual crowd favorites came between the late ’70s and late ’90s during an era when masked men with an edge were all over the place, from Hextall, Potvin and Roy to Hall of Famer Billy Smith, Steve Shields and Sean Burke.
“There had to be at least 80 fights a year, so the opportunity was at least once a night for something to break out to extend beyond two guys fighting,” said retired goaltender Glen Hanlon, who got into five scraps in the NHL, including two against another goalie. “Back then, watching the two turtles race to center ice to have a fight didn’t seem that crazy and it was a lot of excitement. There was a lot more squaring off, a lot more 5-on-5 fighting — just a bunch more situations.”
Not anymore. The most recent NHL goalie fight was between Edmonton’s Mike Smith and Calgary’s Cam Talbot on Feb. 1, 2020.
A couple of Stanley Cup winning-goalies, Jordan Binnington and Marc-Andre Fleury, tried to throw down during a game between St. Louis and Minnesota in March 2023, but officials prevented it from happening. Binnington was ejected and suspended two games for throwing a punch at a Wild forward.
“If you’re going for it, you’re going for it,” said Binnington, who lost $65,000 in salary as a result. “Last year was close. And I feel like the linesmen have been told to really not let it happen, which is understandable. They’re doing their job, and that’s what the NHL wants.”
It is an automatic ejection to cross the center red line for a fight along with the potential for fines and suspensions. No team wants to lose a goalie over a fight.
After Emery skated the length of the rink to fight Braden Holtby during an early-season Washington blowout of Philadelphia in 2013, Commissioner Gary Bettman brought up the topic when he saw Emery at the White House for the celebration of Chicago’s championship the previous season.
“So just hypothetically, if there was a rule that said if you cross the red line to get into a fight with the other goaltender and you get a 10-game suspension, would you have done it?” Bettman asked Emery.
“What?” Emery replied. “Are you crazy?”
No such rule exists, but even the thought of being tossed from an important game and risking the consequences of an injury to your replacement is enough to dissuade goalies from fighting.
“There’s so much parity in the sport right now that every game matters so much,” Esche said. “It’s tough to put yourself in a position to have to fight as a goalie.”
Esche, now president of the American Hockey League’s Utica Comets, thinks there are plenty of goalies who would want to fight, if the opportunity existed. So many of them grew up watching Don Cherry’s “‘Rock’Em Sock’em’ Hockey” videos or have checked out goalie fights on YouTube.
In his younger days, Darcy Kuemper would watch those videos before games to get pumped up. Fellow Capitals goalie Charlie Lindgren can rattle off some of the classics like they’re Ali-Frazier.
“They’re very memorable when you see goalies go at it,” Lindgren said. “Even going back to juniors, my junior partner got into a fight with our rival team. That was a full-out line brawl, and obviously sitting and watching that close was really cool. Certainly something I’ll never forget. When it happens, it’s exciting, and I’m sure all the fans love it, too.”
Parents? Not so much. Biron’s son, Jacob, is a 19-year-old goaltender who has worked on fighting techniques with teammates after practice — just in case, Dad — only to be met with a stern rebuke.
“I’m like: ‘Please don’t,’ ” Biron said. “You’re going to get either hurt by taking a punch or hurt by giving out a punch. And he laughs. But I’m like: ‘Do as I say, not what I did. Don’t even think about it.’ ”
That said, Biron acknowledges he would react differently if his teammate got caught with a dirty hit and a brawl broke out.
“The fierce competitor and the teammate and the person that’s like that in me would be like, ‘Look out, I’m coming in again,’ ” Biron said. “And that’s stupid, but I think if I was in that same situation, I’d probably do the same thing.”
Binnington, the Blues goalie, said he doesn’t think goalie fighting will ever become extinct. Neither does retired goalie Michael Leighton, whose fights were limited to juniors and the minor leagues.
“Goalies get intense, too,” he said. “Some guy takes an extra whack at you or there’s a bunch of guys fighting, you just get intense and fight once in a while.”
Seems like we’re going down this road every year now. Spring training arrives, Scott Boras still has one or two high profile unsigned free agents and for them and their families it’s getting late early. “Where, oh where,” Boras asks himself, “is that One Dumb Owner when I need him?”
To his eternal credit, he usually does find him, but this year feels a little different, especially with the two top-tier free agent pitchers, Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery, still out there, seemingly garnering no offers anywhere near Boras’ asking price, despite there being a half dozen large market potential contenders that could really use their services.
You could make the case that a half dozen of the wealthiest teams in baseball — the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Giants, Rangers and Angels — all could use a top-of-the-rotation starter to finish off their winter shopping, but so far none have been inclined to even come close to Boras’ asking price for Snell or Montgomery. It may just be this time Boras has grossly misread the market.
His original ask for Snell was said to be nine years and around $270 million. The Yankees early on were interested and reportedly offered a deal in the neighborhood of six years, $150 million — with one condition: Boras had to say yes, right away, or they were moving on. They were not willing to be played while Boras waited to find the One Dumb Owner who would come close to the $270 million.
Boras said not enough, so the Yankees pivoted to Marcus Stroman on a two-year deal for $37 million. Despite repeated reports by Boras’ acolytes in the media, the Yankees have been out on Snell ever since Boras turned down their offer — and that appears to be the only offer he’s gotten for the Cy Young-award winning lefty.
Why such a lack of interest in a 31-yearold pitcher who’s won two Cy Young Awards (albeit five years apart)? This is what one assistant GM said to me last week — which seems to be an opinion shared by many: “Boras is selling Snell as a No. 1, which he really isn’t given that he’s never thrown more than 180 innings (actually 180⅔) in a season and is essentially a five-inning pitcher because of all the pitches he throws in a game and the walks (major league leading 99 last year). There are also questions about his makeup. He’s pitched in Tampa Bay and San Diego his whole career, and been just OK in those seasons between his Cy Youngs. Can he perform in a big market like New York or Boston?”
There appears to be somewhat more interest in the ex-Yankee Montgomery for whom Boras was said to be asking a contract similar to the seven-year, $172 million the Phillies doled out to retain Aaron Nola. But Montgomery’s former team, the Rangers, are apparently tapped out due a lot to the uncertain future of their regional sports network situation. The Red Sox and Angels could be nice fits for Montgomery but the Sawx under John Henry, the soccer, hockey and RFK racing man, are no longer in the business of doing long-term free agent contracts, and Angels owner Arte Moreno, still smarting over owing Anthony Rendon another $115 million through 2026, is also out of the big money free agent business for a while.
The same Boras media apostles who tried to keep the Yankees’ interest in Snell alive are now pushing Montgomery on the Mets. While I agree the Mets could certainly use Montgomery, I don’t see David Stearns abandoning his plan and reversing course by convincing Steve Cohen to go even deeper into luxury tax debt by investing another $150 million or so on a free agent pitcher.
Indeed, at the Cody Bellinger re-signing press conference with the Cubs last week — in which he lamely tried to explain why he had to settle for a three-year, $80 million deal with opt-outs after reportedly originally seeking 12 years and upwards of $200 million — Boras bemoaned the lack of spending this winter by a lot of the large market teams: “In the face of record revenues in our game that will continue to spiral upward, we have major market teams, many of which would otherwise be competitive teams and not investing in competitiveness. We look at the mass decline [of spending] just in eight teams, you might see over $300 million that was spent a year ago that is not being spent today.”
On Friday, Boras was forced to do a similar deal for third baseman Matt Chapman with the Giants — a three-year, $54 million contract, again with opt-outs after the first two years — after previously seeking a six-year deal in the $150 million range.
So with no one apparently ready to step up as this year’s One Dumb Owner — as Colorado’s Dick Monfort did in mid-March 2022 by bidding against himself and signing Kris Bryant for seven years, $182 million, or Detroit’s Mike Ilitch going where no one else was willing to go near in signing Prince Fielder for nine years, $245 million in 2012 — Boras appears to be running out of teams.
Right now, he needs to hope a team with designs on the postseason loses a top starting pitcher to injury. Which brings us to the Giants, who have the money and already have two projected down-rotation starters sidelined with injuries this spring in Keaton Winn and Tristan Beck. I’m told Dusty Baker, now a Giants top advisor, has been urging a reluctant Giants Baseball Ops chief Farhan Zaidi to sign Montgomery. But those who know him well say Montgomery, a good ole South Carolina boy, would hate it in San Francisco.
That won’t matter to Boras as long as gets the money. Witness Bryant, who’s been mostly hurt and not very good in his two seasons in Colorado, last week saying he regrets signing that seven-year deal with the Rockies and consigning himself to last place for the foreseeable future. “There were other teams interested [in signing him] but I didn’t want to wait around. I guess I didn’t do as much research into the prospects as I could.”
(For the record, the rotund Fielder was traded to Texas by the Tigers after two years and played only five years of that contract.)
Undoubtedly Boras would love to see the Snell/Montgomery scenario play out the way it did for him with Bryce Harper in the spring of 2019 when, with the help of last-minute bidding by the Dodgers and Giants, on March 2 he was able to get Phillies CEO John Middleton to pony up the record contract he was looking for – 13 years, $330 million. At the time, I called Middleton that year’s One Dumb Owner, only because he’d offered a 10-year contract of around $300 million for Harper two months earlier, only to have Boras let it sit there with no response, all the time waiting for a better offer.
But I now have to admit Middleton has so far gotten his money’s worth on the contract as Harper, despite being sidelined two months last year with Tommy John surgery, has been the Phillies team leader and been a beast in the last two postseasons with 11 homers and 21 RBI. When he signed the 13-year deal which will take him to his age 38 season, all Harper could talk about was how this contract assured him of everything he wanted, to be a Phillie for the rest of his career.
Ah, but Boras being Boras, all of a sudden the biggest contract in baseball history is not enough, and despite eight years and over $200 million remaining on it, he and Harper are now saying they want an extension. I would call this the height of chutzpah. Others might suggest they’re merely giving Middleton another chance at being a One Dumb Owner.