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Loading ...Christy posted this morning about fighting and its place in the NHL. It was short, it was sweet, and I agreed with it completely.
Fighting has a place as a part of the game–but at the same time, it’s not the only thing about the game. This is what tends to get me tagged “anti-fighting” by random toolboxen that are (in my opinion) the hockey equivalent of NASCAR “fans” that go to races just to see multiple-car pileups on Turn 3.
Whatever. If you only want to see a fight, go to a boxing match.
Me? I can take or leave it.
What I can leave are the big bench-clearing brawls of yore. Sure, they’re entertaining to watch on old highlight reels, but they’re kinda pointless.
What I can take–or could take, before the Instigator Rule–is the respect that came from knowing that if you took a run at or used your stick to carve up the face of a team’s big gun, you could expect to have some rough Tyrian justice dished up on you by one of his teammates or perhaps that player himself.
Action/reaction, cause/effect, action/consequence. It’s the way of the Universe, just like evolution. Anyone who blithely bashes fighting in hockey is, 9 times out of 10, somebody who either can’t or won’t see the natural progression of things.
That said:
The day of the player that can’t do anything but fight is gone–that’s an example of the evolution of the sport. A player has to have more than one dimension to his game these days, if he wants to get anywhere. I don’t have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is the Instigator Rule, which has reduced fighting to a Flowery War rather than a means of primal justice and allowed the Bryan Marchments of the League to waylay others like marauding bandits while the patrolling cops are forced to sit by and do nothing lest they hurt their team by dealing with the miscreant. The current sad state of the League’s officiating crew isn’t helping matters either–but that’s something for another post.
Discuss.
I can’t contribute much to this discussion; you pretty much covered everything I wanted to say. I will say that a bench-clearer that gets it over with is preferable to that braindead procession of line brawls with OTT-PHI three years ago.
Dunno if you read the Boston Globe article that was linked in the comments of that thread, but there seems to be a growing sentiment that while cleaning things up was a good idea at the time, they’ve gone a little too far in that regard. Get rid of the goons, fine, but don’t get rid of the frontier justice, which is nothing more than an outcropping of the emotion and physicality of the game. I have no problem killing third-man-in and the ejections for simultaneous “secondary” fights.
I agree, someone gets thrown out for warning the oppositing for running the goalie or such is not cool.