Often times in sports, rivalries are created by the media to push numbers and narratives of different stories to peak audience interest, but the best rivalries are created totally organically.
In hockey, many of the best rivalries involve some factor of dirty play, which ends up leading to a lot of fights.
So, it would make sense that team vs. team fighting data might give you an idea of the biggest rivalries in hockey. This all started off with a graphic made from data on hockeyfights.com. They track fights in the NHL all the way back to 1957, so you can see which teams have fought the most and that is this list.
Looking at that list, it’s obvious that some of the original six teams are getting a boost from their long existence. Reddit user Opreviously did some great work starting data about the teams that have fought the most per matchup, although our numbers came out slightly differently.
Here are the numbers for the teams in that graphic sorted by fights per game including only regular season games starting in 1957-58 (Numbers via Hockey Reference and Hockey Fights):
CGY-EDM 254-230 – 1.10 FPG
CHI-STL 290-307 – 0.95 FPG
NYR-PHI 245-289 – 0.85 FPG
MTL-BOS 308-444 – 0.69 FPG
TOR-DET 251-380 – 0.66 FPG
Then, we checked out some of the other top fights per game from current NHL rivalries:
WSH-PHI 227-212 – 1.07 FPG
CGY-ANA 102-102 – 1.00 FPG
CGY-CBJ 52-55 – 0.95 FPG
CGY-VAN 215-233 – 0.92 FPG
CHI-VAN 145-186 – 0.78 FPG
LAK-ANA 100-133 – 0.75 FPG
TOR-OTT 76-113 – 0.67 FPG
MON-TOR 143-366 – 0.39 FPG
From there, we also decided to look at each team’s most fought rival and to no one’s surprise, the Broad Street Bullies lead the way, being five separate teams’ biggest rival.
PHI – 5 (WSH, NYR, NJ, PIT, NYI)
BOS – 3 (MTL, OTT, BUF)
STL – 3 (CHI, DAL, CBJ)
Finally, if you go outside of the current NHL, you’ll notice that the Nordiques and Whalers sit atop many fights per game lists, because there existence was smack dab in the middle of the time period with the most fighting.
BOS-QUE 145-111 – 1.31 FPG
QUE-TOR 54-45 – 1.20 FPG
BOS-HRT 146-123 – 1.19 FPG
QUE-HRT 142-121 – 1.17 FPG
QUE-BUF 123-111 – 1.11 FPG
QUE-MON 109-112 – 0.97 FPG
