Hockey Fighting Continues to Decline, And Good Riddance

As a card-carrying member of the Fighting In Hockey Is Stupid Club, it is with a heavy heart that I must inform the world of the following fact—with a little more than 40 percent of the 2016-17 NHL season in the books, fighting is on the rise.

Yes, this is a dark day for all the men like me who understand fighting is superfluous in hockey and have been told via various social media channels that we should "write about tennis" and asked if we pee sitting down. After seeing fight totals reach a record low in 2015-16, fists are flying again this season, and someone with a Tie Domi avatar is ready to accuse us have sand in our assorted existent or non-existent genitals.

But, like, fighting is still down, basically. So maybe calm down, tough guys.

According to hockeyfights.com, there were 469 fights in 2013-14; 391 fights in 2014-15; and 344 fights in 2015-16. The league is on pace for around 360 fights this season. That would be a slight rise from last year, but still the second-fewest total fights since the NHL became a 30-team league in 2000-01.

This is good. In every way. This is heavily trampled ground, so there's no reason to lay out all the negative aspects of two men stopping a game to punch in each other in the face, helmet and sometimes visor.

The only honest fan argument for fighting to remain in hockey is because the caveman portion of your brain loves to see two strangers throw bare knuckles into each other's heads. There's a reason why UFC is a billion-dollar industry and you get pumped when someone sends you a World Star street fight video.

The only honest player argument is that fighting keeps fighters employed in a highly paid job, and friends of fighters don't want to see their buddies unemployed.

The one argument that unites the above parties—and has been proven invalid over these three-plus seasons—is that fighting deters dirty plays. Want to hit someone in the head with an elbow? Or cheap shot someone? Well, you'll think twice about it if the threat of fighting looms. This is, of course, an asinine argument, as cheap shots have co-existed with fights since hockey became a sport, but fighting forever has been painted as serving an important (and ironic) function in player safety.

Indeed, debates over hockey fighting typically lead to a disprovable assertion: "Fewer fighters would mean more injurious, malicious hits, so if you think there are a lot of suspension-worthy plays now, that number will grow when fighting stops."

But these past few years are beginning to show that's just not true.

Fighting has fallen to all-time lows since 2013-14. So have suspensions for illegal hits. Eight players have been suspended a total of 24 games for illegal hits during the regular season; through the same time period in 2015-16, nine players were suspended 20 games; in 2014-15, it was 14 players for 38 games, and in 2013-14, it was 22 players for 90 games.

We can argue all day about where the line should be when it comes to the Department of Player Safety's willingness to suspend players for illegal hits, but there's a clear decline in suspension-worthy actions alongside the decline in fighting. Some of the biggest offenders when it comes to hits deemed over the line—Raffi Torres, John Scott, Patrick Kaleta, Maxim Lapierre and Zac Rinaldo—are no longer in the league. Shawn Thornton is another repeat offender and while he's still in the league, he has only played 12 games this season.

How can fighting, which is alleged to minimize dirty hits, be on the decline alongside those same dirty hits? Is it possible that by getting rid of dirty players—who are almost always fighters, and therefore fear no repercussions from dirty hits because they are, in fact, fighters—the league also has reduced dirty hits? Or is that a coincidence? (It's not)

It's also not a coincidence that the NHL's best and most fun teams are almost entirely goon-free. The Chicago Blackhawks didn't punch their way to three Stanley Cups. The Los Angeles Kings won two Stanley Cups without a one-dimensional enforcer. The Pittsburgh Penguins skated teams to death to win last year's Stanley Cup, and if anyone can make a case that fighting has no place in hockey today, it would be a member of that organization.

Here's Penguins GM Jim Rutherford in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Even though he has Tom Sestito under contract, he's spot-on:

"When you look at the best events in hockey, the Olympics and World Cup, you don't have any fighting," Rutherford said. "Even when you get to the Stanley Cup finals, you don't have any fights. I don't think we need it. It will eventually go away once everybody gets a full facemask. It's pretty much to the point now where the fourth lines on most teams are lines that are penalty-killers or skilled players."

The natural response to this from a man in his early-50s at a tailgate who knows you work in hockey and wants to talk to you about fighting in hockey when all you want to do is drink beer and eat wings is something like, "The playoffs are a different animal. You need fighting in the regular season sometimes to keep the other team honest."

Ok, sure. That's one way to look at it. Fighting is like an arms race; if nobody has fighters, you don't need to fight. Yeah, there will be the occasional Cody Eakin plowing over Henrik Lundqvist or David Pastrnak tearing through Dan Girardi, but those are isolated incidents when it comes to skilled players doing dumb things. And remember: the threat of a fight did nothing to protect Lundqvist and Girardi and never will. I'd take whoopsies from Pastrnak and Eakin over the chronic violations of guys like Thornton, Scott and Torres any day.

Even if we disagree on that point, the one thing everyone who loves hockey can agree on is this—the hockey in the Stanley Cup Playoffs is the beeeeeeeest. And there's practically no fighting. It's not an accident that when the best teams ice their best players, you get the best hockey. Fighters are never teams' best players or even their average ones. This is math that does not require a degree in advanced calculus to understand.

And really, have you ever watched a hockey fight? Nine of out of 10 of them, from a pure bloodlust standpoint, are about as satisfying as a gluten-free pizza. It's hugging and a couple glancing blows before they fall down. If hockey fights were boxing matches you'd demand your pay-per-view money back from Gary Bettman. When you're arguing for fighting, you're basically arguing for a slightly more violent dance than the one Joey did with the building superintendent on that episode of Friends.

If you love it when a dude gets knocked unconscious either by a punch or his head cracking on the ice, what's wrong with you?

Hockey is safer and better without fighting. Isn't that a fair tradeoff for getting rid of it?