Jay Miller fights Chris Nilan in the first of two bouts on Dec 6, 1985. They fought five times in the Bruins-Canadiens rivalry. AP Photo/Peter Southwick

Rivalries Unlocked

We've unlocked year restrictions on our rivalry and loyalty pages. Only containing numbers for the past decade, they now contain full information for every regular season we have in our archives.

For the NHL, our current numbers go back to 1957-58.

The Original Six teams are all fun to look at, but we now know the Canadiens and Bruins have easily fought the most over the past 50+ years. Bruins Team Rivals | Canadiens Team Rivals

Biggest Bruin basher? Chris Nilan. Hab hater? Jay Miller and Lydon Byers (for the Bruins, both Rob Ray and Torrie Robertson have more majors vs the Canadiens).

A couple of other interesting tidbits:

• Despite having many more years to rack up majors vs each other, the Rangers and Blackhawks each have non-Original Six Teams as top rivals (the Flyers and Blues, respectively).
• The top non-Original Six rivalry: Flyers-Penguins.

About the numbers

• The numbers are from the regular season only, so no playoff or preseason fights are included.
• The fights are "fight incidents", not raw fighting major numbers. The definition is very simple: if either player in an altercation received a fighting major, it was counted as a "fight".
• I don't expect the overall leaders to change too much as we add earlier seasons.  There weren't as many fights in the 50s and earlier, but we will be adding more seasons soon, so maybe I'll be proven wrong.

About accuracy

Anyone who's researched old hockey statistics knows how challenging it can be to rely on old boxscores, game summaries and scoresheets. Like all older sports stats, there's always a chance something isn't 100% complete, or there was human error in any part of the process of record. Video has allowed us to make many corrections over the past 30-40 years, but it's more difficult beyond that. We will continue to fact-check and correct best we can.