Was Brady Tkachuk's Third Period Fight on Saturday Night "Wasted Energy?

Ottawa Senators captain Brady Tkachuk is one of the NHL's best power forwards. He leads the Senators in goal scoring; he's their emotional leader and that rare bull-in-a-china-shop skill player who 31 general managers would kill to have on their team.

However, there's a growing sentiment out there that Tkachuk gets too emotional when adversity hits.

On Saturday night, with the Sens trailing Vancouver 4-1 in what would be their fifth straight loss, Tkachuk got a high stick in the face and then began to run around for a few shifts, getting physical. Eventually, as Tkachuk was skating to the Ottawa bench during a stoppage, Vancouver's Dakota Joshua had enough, veered into his path, and the two of them went at it.

Some of the dialogue, including from HNIC's Craig Simpson, was that it was "wasted energy." Here's the fight, which you can see was instigated by Joshua, along with Simpson's post-fight lecturing of Tkachuk.

Other pundits have also spoken out about Tkachuk's late game emotion like it's a chronic problem that happens nightly or that it's one of the reasons for the current losing streak.

What I believe Simpson (and others) are basically saying is that they don't believe a star player being in a fight or getting physical can change the momentum of a game enough to make it worth the price of him being in the penalty box.

But let's check on it. What exactly happened after Tkachuk's fight on Saturday? Oh, the Sens came back and made a game of it. And from a team-bonding perspective, what did Tkachuk's teammates say about his scrap and the one Tim Stutzle got into?

"Anytime a guy goes out there and puts his body on the line and fights, and Timmy, he's not a fighter, teammates respect that for sure," Josh Norris told the media. "And those are our two best players and it just shows us how much they care and how much they want to turn this thing around."

Sometimes you can't win.

A lot of pundits and fans would also get sour on the Senators if they went quietly and lost last night without showing any emotion.

The Sens were in the process of losing their fifth in a row and the Canucks had just shown up them up badly with a cute little game of keep away during a 6 on 5 on a delayed penalty. They just passed it around for almost two minutes, which is easy to do when you have an extra man and you aren't trying to score. There was a time in the NHL when that was an easy recipe for a bench clearing brawl.

As a sidebar, if there's emotion that needs to be curtailed, it's probably the baring of players' souls with the media after games. Reporters are smart to ask about emotions, and the players are great for answering all our questions. But when you're going sideways like this, negotiating a daily run of questions like, "Are you a fragile group, are you frustrated, are you deflated?" doesn't serve them well.

If I'm Travis Green, I'm instructing the players to politely deflect all questions about emotions. "Yeah, I'd rather not get into that part of it. I just think we have to keep trusting the process." Or whatever hockey cliche you prefer.

Meanwhile, everyone is pointing fingers at everything right now, and every tactic seems flawed when you're in a five-game funk. But I think it's insanity to ask Tkachuk to rein things in and neuter the emotion that fuels him. Either way, we can all agree the Senators have way bigger concerns right now than their captain's give-a-crap meter being set too high.