Fighting Majors

Most regular visitors of the site know we have a very simple way of counting a “fight”: if one player receives a fighting major during an incident, it gets logged.  That’s it.  Nothing subjective on our end.

That doesn’t mean the call itself isn’t subjective.  I receive emails from time to time about a “missed fight”, generally some roughings, and it’s rare they should have been called majors.  The incident just happens to involve the emailer’s favorite player or team.

More frequently I’ll get a note asking “how was that a fight?” with a link to a fight page.  Bad fights or questionable majors calls happen too, I don’t get to call them, just log them.

It’s rare you see bad roughings and bad majors called in the same game, but we got both in tonight’s Senators vs Lighting game.

Tampa goaltender Mike Smith didn’t care for Chris Neil‘s slewfoot/trip and went right after him.  If it weren’t for Mattias Ohlund, we might have seen something a bit longer, but real punches were definitely thrown.  Roughings were called, presumably because a goalie was involved and the game continued.

It wouldn’t have seemed so odd until fighting majors were called when Matt Carkner went after Todd Fedoruk (video).  Was that really any more of a “fight”?

The entire game was riddled with odd calls and Tampa’s television color analyst Bobby Taylor didn’t hold back any criticism, eventually referring to the officiating crew as “idiots in the zebra stripes”.