Thursday Trio
Three fights last night. Francois Beauchemin‘s Duck uniform must be getting to him as he threw some wild punches with Nick Boynton. Shame the linesmen broke that one up when they did.
Zack Stortini continued getting acquainted with the NHL, meet up with Andrew Peters.
John Erskine returned last night for the Washington Capitals. Thanks to reader Matt S for the reminder.
Green-Veilleux from yesterday was added.
Four games on tap for tonight, a few with potential to be good contests.
Last night’s fights:
Beauchemin vs Boynton Feb 15, 2007
Stortini vs Peters Feb 15, 2007
Hollweg vs Commodore Feb 15, 2007
Reminder:
There’s now a hockeyfights.com fight videos feed.
Some reads:
Brawls deserve a fighting chance in NHL
Steve Politi of The Star-Ledger pulls no punches:
Instead, his sport went all peace-love-and-happiness on him, the pansies in the league office making tough guys like him increasingly unimportant. So now Janssen, a kid with endless guts and a mean right hook, rides the Devils’ bench most nights.
And this is really what makes me want to drop the gloves: The NHL thought limiting fighting will make the sport more mainstream. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad. The nerds who run this sport figured without the brawls, some little old lady in Peoria would find Versus on her cable system and declare, “I’m going to give this beautiful sport a try!”
The result, like much of what Gary Bettman has done, is the opposite. Attendance is down in several markets, and they’ll need a breakthrough in nanomathematics to compute recent TV ratings. The lack of fighting is not the main reason, but the farther this sport gets from its roots, the closer it gets to irrelevancy.
Alanah thinks we should add some hotness into the NHL’s marketing, and who am I to disagree?
