Mike Chen's Hockey Blog
No Steel Cages Here
by Mike Chen on 02/05/09 at 12:26 PM ET
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Kudos to NHLPA head honcho Paul Kelly for acknowledging what a lot of hockey fans were already thinking—that the “staged fights” between each team’s respective goons are getting to the point of silliness and are pretty unnecessary for the game. Whatever your opinion is on fighting, be it pro or con, I think that we can all agree that at least this level of scripted fisticuffs should go the way of the dodo—or at least banished to the wrestling ring. (Donald Brashear vs. Kurt Angle? That might be fun to watch.)
How predictable has it all become? At a recent Sharks/Ducks game, I posted a gameday poll at Battle of California asking readers to guess when Jody Shelley and George Parros would drop the gloves. Not surprisingly, the majority of readers picked the right time range (second half of the first period).
The question, of course, then becomes how do you regulate something like this? There’s a big difference between said Shelley/Parros fight and Vincent Lecavalier trying to stick up for his goalie against the Islanders. I know that, you know that, and everyone watching knows that. But on-ice officiating? How can they create rules that regulate it so that the nonsense fighting is filtered out?
Do you base it on a guy’s reputation? If that’s the case, then it’d be up to the refs to jump in and whistle it dead before things get too far. The fighters know what they’re doing, and there’s a difference between when a guy is so worked up that it takes his own teammates to hold him back and when two goons tell each other “Good scrap” after a fight. Fights that occur out of passion will generally be much more difficult to blow dead compared to when it’s just two goons doing what they think they should be doing. If it really is just a staged fight, I don’t think you’ll get too many complaints from anyone on the ice.
Another way to approach it on the ice is to heighten the penalty of the whole thing. Would the league go as far as to insert an additional two-minute delay of game penalty for fights that are deemed to be outside of the game’s flow? I don’t think that’d be too difficult to implement because it wouldn’t affect the on-ice play that much; rather, you’d just have goons sitting for seven minutes instead of five. Under this scenario, you let them go at it and they’re simply removed from the game for a little longer. I’m not sure how much of a deterrent that would be as these guys barely top ten minutes a night in ice time.
Perhaps the most effective way to address this is by attacking their paycheck. Simply let all the fighters in the league know that their fights will be reviewed by the league. If something seems as scripted and predictable as a WWE match (especially if the bring out the steel chairs or breakable tables), then both combatants get fined. Remember, these guys aren’t pulling in the $7 million paychecks; often times, they’re much closer to the league minimum. So if that’s the case, hitting their wallet probably hurts more than a punch to the gut.
I’m not saying I want to ban fighting totally—that’s a debate for another time, and it’s a much more complicated one. But the usefulness of Goon A fighting Goon B just for the sake of it has is long past its prime. Let’s keep the game focused on the game and leave sideshow stuff to failed pay-per-view events.
Filed in: NHL | Mike Chen's Hockey Blog | Permalink
Tags: Fighting, Paul+Kelly,
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