Old time, ‘drop the gloves’ style hockey doesn’t have the same amount of supporters as it used to.
The game has undeniably become exponentially faster and more skill based, and room in the NHL for the enforcer and for lots of other ‘rough and tumble’ styles of hockey is almost non-existent. While lots of people think that this is a good thing, and that hockey has advanced beyond the need for incessant roughness, Columbus Blue Jackets head coach John Tortorella wholeheartedly disagrees.
Tortorella was blunt in his statement, when he expressed that the NHL has become a ‘hug fest’, and that the league lacks a certain hatred between clubs that he really misses. He wasn’t shy in describing how much on-ice conversations between players on opposing teams frustrated him.
While we’re big fans of the budding bromances between players on different teams, we can see where Tortorella is coming from. There definitely hasn’t been an occurrence quite like the infamous line brawl that took place in Vancouver, when Torts was the Canucks head coach, and they kicked off their game against the Calgary Flames with all gloves on the ice. The brawl wound up seeing over 130 penalty minutes handed out between the two teams.
Now THAT is the kind of hate-fueled violence that Tortorella is talking about.
Last season, there were 280 fights that occurred in the NHL, good for 17.86% of games where firsts were exchanged. This is down from the year before, when 24.88% of games had fights, and way down from the 2012-2013 season, when 36.67% of games had fights.
