Will the NHL ever scrap the scrap?
Minnesota's Marcus Foligno took a hit, delivered one of his own to Chicago's Jarred Tinordi — and the two big guys dropped the gloves. Outdoors in front of 82,000 people in the Meadowlands, it took even less for Matt Rempe and Matt Martin to spice up the Rangers-Islanders showdown with a fight.
When Morgan Rielly crosschecked Ridly Greig for firing a slap shot into an empty net? Some pushing and shoving. Nothing more. “How there wasn't a brawl there, I don't know how everyone didn't start fighting,” wondered Todd Simpson, a 50-year-old retired player who piled up more than 1,300 penalty minutes in 580 NHL games. “That should've been a big fight.”
All of these situations were over the past month alone, riveting reminders fighting is alive and well in the NHL even if diminished. It has been 20 years since Simpson and his Ottawa teammates got into a fight fest at Philadelphia, a game that still holds the NHL record with an astounding 419 penalty minutes. Those kinds of clashes are gone, faded like the cheap shots and blood in Slap Shot. Like the movie, however, fighting is warmly remembered, even desired, by many fans and cheering on the brawls remains common.
“It doesn't happen often, but you still have to have it,” said Vancouver Canucks coach Rick Tocchet, whose 237 career fights rank 21st all-time. “When I played, you could really use it as intimidation. You can still use it a little bit today, but not as much. The staged fighting and all that stuff, that doesn't work anymore. But there is a time and place for it.”
FIGHTING ON THE WANE
According to HockeyFights.com, there have been 219 fights this season through Monday with 63 more projected before the playoffs begin for a total of 282, which would be a sharp drop from the 789 in 2003-04 and from 645 in 2010-11.
Rule changes are part of the reason. The institution of the salary cap in 2005 made it more difficult for a team to pay a player whose skills were limited to throwing punches and protecting stars. In 2013, it became illegal to take a helmet off to fight and mandatory visors were grandfathered in.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has said the fighting helps keep tensions from boiling over.
“Fighting, in the spontaneous sense, tends to act as a bit of a thermostat when things happen in the course of the game,” Bettman said in 2013. Discussing a fight between Jarome Iginla and Vincent Lecavalier, Bettman said, “I'd rather them be punching each other than swinging sticks at each other.”
WILL FIGHTING SURVIVE?
“It always needs to be in the game,” said St. Louis Blues captain Brayden Schenn, who has fought twice this season. “You need guys to police it themselves, and if you're going to run around and make a big hit, you've got to know that sometimes you're going to have to deal with the consequences.”
That is certainly the opinion of Steve Oleksy, who HockeyFights. com credits with 107 bouts at various levels, including the NHL. Now 38 and retired, he believes fighting will be virtually extinct a decade from now.
“I think it declines exponentially, but I also think the definition of a fight has changed so much,” Oleksy said.
“The number of actual punches, actual fights — what we would deem a fight back in the day — I just don't think that's there, either. And I think with that comes the rise in incidents like the cross-checking incidents, slashing, two-handers, things like that.”
FIGHTING'S LEGACY
Like many sports, hockey is facing the fallout from concussions and other traumatic brain injuries.
The deaths of old-school enforcers like Derek Boogaard and Bob Probert, posthumously found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) has changed some minds. Oleksy contends heavyweights of that vintage are no longer in the game and the risk of serious injury is much less now.