Quote:
Originally Posted by bigdottawa
If you're going to suspend guys for fighting 10+ times, why not just outlaw it all together?
As mentioned before, they want to get rid of the types who are ONLY there to fight and don't skate or do much of anything else. The guys for whom that is their ENTIRE role.
But there are plenty of players who actually play regularly and score goals and stuff who end up dropping the gloves more in the heat of the moment with somebody else. And those guys tend to get fewer than 11 fighting majors in a year. And apparently most people feel like those situations are still okay.
They just don't like the guys who get 25 fighting majors in 18 games played on the season with almost zero ice-time.
And by making this rule they are pushing out a more definitive guideline about it and really sending a message. They aren't saying something vague like, "we're going to be giving harsher suspensions for high hits that are over-the-line" where a bunch of players and coaches and officials all become confused all at once at where the new line is (and nobody really was quite sure where the old line was).
The fighting stuff is all kind of done by general "understanding" of what is appropriate and what isn't. If they just tell teams/players that they can't fight unless it is appropriate to the game then everyone starts going wonky trying to figure out what that definition is supposed to mean. Here they are directly telling the guys who rack up 10+ fighting majors, "you better have some purpose for being out there other than fighting because you won't last very long if you don't."
Somewhat interestingly, I believe fighting had already been on a little bit of a downward trend in the OHL anyway. Either one or zero players with 200+ PIM's in the OHL for each of the last four seasons. And Zac Rinaldo accounted for two out of three times somebody made that milestone.
2006-07 and 2007-08 there were three guys each season with 200+ PIM's and 2 or 3 other guys at 195 or so. To go from that to actually having a season with ZERO players reaching 200 PIM's is pretty significant imo.
Obviously this move is designed to crank it way down. Two enforcer/tough-guys who don't like each other are going to think twice about getting in their second or third scrap in the same game.
Agree with Triumph that it sells tickets though. Number of fans of the team I'm with that are super-vocal about them getting tougher and get more big-time enforcers pretty much never ends. A lot of them are still kind of living in 1997 though. The game has changed...and is going to continue to do so.