Fighting in Hockey

After a conversation with @amr008, @jfang003 and some others yesterday, I was inspired to write about a very traditional aspect of hockey: fighting!

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Overview

Many of you have probably seen on YouTube videos or even movies two guys on a hockey rink drop their gloves and start throwing punches at each other. What some people may not know is that scenes like that are actually pretty common in real-life professional hockey.

While technically against the rules, fighting is highly tolerated by the NHL, meaning that if two players get into a fight, they will still be penalized and will have to spend 5 minutes off the ice, but that's all. Unlike most other sports, there is no investigation, no suspension, no fines.

History

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Fighting - or "Fisticuffs", as it was called - became part of the official rules of the NHL in 1922, even though it always happened ever since the creation of the sport.

With the introduction of the 5 minute penalty, rather than automatic ejection, fighting became a valid strategy for some teams to show that their players would not be pushed around. Fighting became such a huge thing that a common joke was "I went to a fight, and a hockey game broke out!"

Goons

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In the 70's teams started to bring a new kind of player to the game. The goon, or enforcer, was a player who specialized in one thing, and one thing only: fighting. They didn't need to be very skilled with a stick, they didn't need to score, hell, some of them could barely skate! But what they could do with a terrific efficiency was literally getting their hands bloody.

Goons would either hunt down the other team's star player or protect their own team's star player from the other goons and when two of them met each other, things could get ugly.

Today and beyond

Fighting is becoming less frequent over the years and there are many possible reasons to explain that. There is a cultural factor that really changed how fans respond to violence and how young players are trained in junior leagues. There are also more studies on the impact of fighting on the health of the players and also there is the voice of some players and former players who are against this practice (some of them even used to be enforcers back in their days).

Despite all that, a lot of people - players and team staff included - still defend that fighting is a crucial part of the game and that it even prevents greater acts of violence, since it allows players to blow off steam and keep each other in check.

One thing that both sides agree on is that fighting on hockey is not likely going to revert back to its old bloody days but it's not going to completely halt anytime soon so, for the foreseeable future, whether hockey fans like it or not, we are likely to see guys dropping gloves and going at it!

That's it for this post! Let me know if you liked it and if you would like to know more about the fights. Maybe I'll do another post about famous fights, famous goons and the unwritten rules of hockey fighting.