Fighting in hockey

There's nothing to crack down on when someone puts a huge hit on a Sydney Crosby or Alex Ovechkin, but teams want to protect those types of guys from that anyway. When an opposing player knows they're going o have to fight someone if they run one of those stars, they're less likely to do it. It's a system that seems to work in that league.

 

So many fights during the regular season are staged (ie: anything involving goalies). Those are 100% bogus. Where I think fighting is necessary, under current rules anyway, is to send a message to meat heads like Cooke, Gillies, Pronger, etc. after their latest attempt to cripple someone, because players know as well as we do the league isn't doing anything about it. The reduction in fighting in the playoffs has a lot to do with the elimination of the staged fights, and also to do with the buttplugs of the game having their already limited ice time cut even further, which cuts back on their opportunities to do something idiotic that would warrant a fight.


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http://saskawhat.wordpress.com

 

The thing is you still have them in the playoffs. You still have them deep into the playoffs. No you don't have them as often as you do in the regular season, but that's also a product of a whittling down to the best teams, and that means teams with fewer plugs and fewer cheap shot artists. Although they are still there, but then their ice time is usually cut as coaches often shorten their bench for the playoffs. The number of plugs is a by product of having a 30 team league when there should be maybe a 26 team league (judging by available top talent) and having an 82-game season -- obviously the real bad teams are usually going to be filled with more Gillies than the better teams. You also still have instances where emotions boil over leading to a fight -- most famously Iginla and Lacavlier in the 2004 SC final -- and those happen every year in the post season.

As far as International hockey goes they toss you for the game, same as in College hockey. So yes technically you can fight, but you are ejected immediately. That being said, I have admittedly never watched the European Leagues (I have covered college hockey in Canada) but I have talked to players who have played in both the NHL and various Euro leagues and they say there is more stick work over there than in the NHL. Is that a byproduct of a lack of fighting or the way the game is officiated, I don't know. I would rather see gloves dropped than additional hacking and slashing.

 

But it's EXCEEDINGLY rare. HockeyFights.com recorded 19 fighting majors in last year's playoffs, so 9.5 fights, right? (Not quite sure how that math works, but...) George Parros has 23 fighting majors all by himself this regular season.

From an NY Times article from last year:

Since 1994, when the N.H.L. adopted the conference-based playoff system it uses today, the number of regular-season fighting majors has averaged 1 to 1.5 a game. In the playoffs during that period, it has been 0.1 to 0.4 per game.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/sports/hockey/18enforcers.html

 

If only one guy is throwing punches the officials will quite often hand out only one major. May also apply to a third man in situation. Not so common at the NHL level but you definitely see it a lot in the younger age groups.


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http://www.cnn.com/2011/SPORT/09/01/nhl.enforcers.deaths/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

Thought this might be a more appropriate thread than the offseason one for an enforcer discussion
CNNdiscusses the deaths of Belak, Boogard and Rypien

"Three hockey enforcers die young in four months, raising questions"
(CNN) -- It's arguably the toughest job in sports.

"Hockey enforcers earn the undying devotion of fans -- but not much else -- for their ability to punch and get punched on skates. They usually bounce from team to team, barely managing to get a contract for a role few can perform well and no one else wants."

 

"CNN notices hockey, pretends to understand strange winter sport despite doing no original reporting"

 

The thing is, here are obvious health problems involved with playing professional contact sports for a living even when you get beyond concussions, namely the issues of repeated impact injuries. Heck, I would venture a guess that the vast majority of injuries in the NHL, including concussions, come from normal checks and other contact. There's what, half a fight per game on average but something like 40-60 statistical checks (which doesn't include hits that don't separate the player from the puck)? Even if you say a fight is 20 times more likely to cause an injury than a check, that's still five injuries from checks to every one from fighting.

And all the stress that CNN article talks about can also go along with any fourth line scrub, who has the pressure of knowing he'd better do something positive in the next few games or else he might not have a job, and they also come out of the sport with nowhere near the payday of the top-end players.

Like I've said before on this thread, I'm not the world's biggest defender of fighting in hockey, particularly the semi-expected heavyweight on heavyweight bouts, but I think it's become a scapegoat right now for problems people don't fully understand.

 

Well said

 

You get rid of fighting, you'll have a lot more dirty play. I'm not a huge fan of fights, but they do keep the game from becoming a mess.