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What fans lose as the NHL loses hockey fighting
Fighting isn’t down in the NHL. It’s damn near extinct.
There have been 116 fights in the League thus far in 2015-16; the HockeyFights.com projection for the full season is 334 fights, which would mean fewer fights this season than we had when the lockout devoured 510 games in 2012-13 (347 fights in 720 games).
There have been 98 games with a fight this season, which means we’ve had more games go to overtime (102) than have brawls in them. (As if you needed a better example of where the NHL is in 2015 …)
The decline of fighting likely brings varying degrees of celebration to different people.
There are those who have always found the act Neanderthalic and a pox on the sport. There are those who lamented the sideshow fights that derailed games, and the fourth-line goons that participated in them, and feel the NHL is a better place now that enforcers can’t find a dance partner.
There are those who feel it’s impossible to have quasi-endorsement of fighting by the NHL at the same time it advocates player safety, and that fighting needs to go given what we already know about CTE, even if there’s much more to learn.
(And there are those who can’t seem to figure out if the NHL needs enforcers or not. We’re not sure how he, er, they feel about this decline.)
But there’s another category, and I’ll join that conclave: Fans who just sort of miss fighting.
Sure, I can justify its existence as a tactic, beyond that archaic notion that it “protects the players” or “chases away the rats,” when it no longer does either. I’ve spoken to enough people in the NHL to confidently say a fight is still something that can swing momentum, albeit temporarily. It still means something to the players.
And I can get all wistfully nostalgic about rearranging my night to make sure I saw Bob Probert take on the latest challenger to his throne, or to watch the next game between teams after a bloody brawl in the previous game. That was a different NHL. Barring some unforeseen “Attitude Era” if the revenue drops, it ain’t coming back.
I struggle to really express what it is about fighting that I miss without sounding like a callous curmudgeon, but likely there are other curmudgeons that can express it for me.
Dave Bidini – musician, author, and that guy that probably pissed you off on Twitter that one time – had a piece on Vice Sports on Friday that, in the words of the patron saint of hockey fighting movies, really captures the spirit of the thing.
I don't miss fighting. Rather, I miss the idea of fighting. I miss the idea that, at any point, the pressure and tension and drama of a game can explode in a hail of fists; ten men losing their [crap] and addressing their emotions the way we've been taught not to. The cultural significance of fighting is complicated. To me, it was always a little like watching pornography. To paraphrase Susan Sontag: "For the first ten minutes, all you want to do is [fornicate]. For the next ten, it's the last thing you want to do." I wonder if there's a way of getting those first ten minutes back while stopping the next ten from happening.
(For the record, we've only watched porn for the articles...)
“The idea of fighting” is something that a lot of you are probably nodding your head to right now. It’s the chaotic, violent, animalistic and unpredictable aspect of hockey that we lose much of when we lose fighting.
That moment when rivalries boil over between teams or players -- the Canucks' rivalry with the Blackhawks might have been our last fist-based feud. That moment of brief catharsis, in a narrative sense, when justice is served. Flipping past a game, seeing the ice littered with gear and sticking with it because you know that’s not the last of it.
Give Bidini a read. I will say that he places a little too much responsibility on the NHL for the decline in fighting. Sure, it helped craft the rules that have made enforcers nearly obsolete, but in the end it’s the teams making the personnel decisions and the waves of players entering the League – Connor McDavid was five when Probert retired – who are reshaping the League into a place were fights are rare rather than mandatory.
And now, one of the fight rivalries that made me a die-hard puckhead, Probert getting his revenge on Troy Crowder after Crowder knocked off his crown. Ah, the goon old days...
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Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.
