Fighting in the NHL down 20 percent compared to last season
Instead of employing players known for dropping the gloves this season, an increasing number of NHL teams are dropping one-dimensional enforcers from their 23-man rosters.
The proof isn't just in the makeup of various rosters, but also in the number of fighting majors that we've seen so far this season.
From ESPN's Pierre LeBrun:
The total number of fighting majors through Tuesday's games was down 20 percent compared to the same number of games (135) a year ago.
If you go back to the first 135 games in October 2003, fighting majors are down 44 percent.
Recent rule changes - like the additional two minute minor penalty for players that remove their helmets prior to a fight, or the league edict that referees are to halt fights before they start if it's safe to do so - have likely contributed to the lesser number of on-ice bouts this season, but the waning presence of the enforcer still seems central.
One club that appears to have particularly reoriented their view of fisticuffs is the Toronto Maple Leafs, a team that led the NHL in fights last season with 48 in 82 games, according to hockeyfights.com. So far this season, the Maple Leafs have fought just twice through the first nine games.
"(Maple Leafs enforcer and current AHL forward Colton Orr) worked hard and brought other elements besides fighting," Leafs general manager Dave Nonis told LeBrun this week. "He did a good job for us and did play in the playoffs when fighting wasn't part of the game. But the actual minutes that we're trying to pull out of our fourth line and the combinations that we want available for the coaches has lent itself to a different style of player right now."
Orr may have played in the playoffs with the Maple Leafs, but he logged only one third-period shift in the Maple Leafs' epic melt-down during game seven of their first round series against the Boston Bruins in 2013.
"You look at a lot of the teams that have had success the last couple of years," Nonis continued. "They're getting minutes out of their fourth line, and they're not just two or three minutes; sometimes it's 10 or 12 minutes. And players are moving up and down the lineup. That's the direction I think the league is moving in."
Around the league the situation is similar. Even the big bad Bruins - a club that fought 46 times last season - aren't carrying a designated tough guy on their roster after Shawn Thornton departed in unrestricted free agency this summer. They've fought just four times in the early going.
The evidence continues: the Vancouver Canucks eschewed martial-type tactics for years, until last season when they carried Tom Sestito on their roster for 77 games in which he logged just over six minutes per contest. Sestito has yet to debut this season for a Canucks team that seems intent on a more even distribution of minutes this year.
This week, Sestito's head coach Willie Desjardins was explicit about why the tough guy has been a mainstay in the press box.
"He has to transition his game to our play," Desjardins told Sportsnet's Dan Murphy. “He has kind of been in the league as a protector and we want to get him into the role of a player so he’s like everyone else. If something happens, he deals with it, but no more than any other player. So it is a bit of a transition and I don’t feel he is quite there yet."