Fighting Didn’t Stop In The NHL Bubble

It was conspicuously quiet when Mikhail Sergachev and Brian Boyle dropped their gloves and took aim at each other’s faces. Perhaps it was because there were no fans at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto. Or perhaps it was because the game was an exhibition, little more than an opportunity to work off the pandemic-induced rust accumulated over four months of down time.

So it was that hockey’s return — staged in an antiseptic bubble — involved a scrap.

In the NHL’s official restart a few days later, Justin Williams and Ryan Strome came to blows within three minutes. “That’s what a week in a hotel room will do for you,” a member of NBCSN’s broadcast team quipped as a two-person crew cleaned blood off the ice.

Tuning in for the NHL postseason has felt a lot like stumbling upon Dana White’s fight island. Like buying a ticket to the pugilism gallery.

HockeyFights.com, the sport’s invaluable video depository, has catalogued 11 bouts during the 2019-20 postseason.¹ Even if pacifism prevails the rest of the way, this postseason will have featured as much documented aggression as the past two playoffs combined, with the fourth-most fights per game in the past nine years.

To be sure, fracases are rare in the playoffs, where the loss of a player for extended time can swing a series. FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver noted in 2014 that fights were about one-third as common in the postseason.

But in the bubble, they have not only been remarkably commonplace but also incredibly drawn-out.

FiveThirtyEight timed each of the 44 postseason fights since 2016 listed on HockeyFights.com. We started timing at the moment when a player’s gloves fell to the ice and ended when an official stepped in to break up the skirmish.²

There have been three minutes and 10 seconds of fighting in the bubble, with the average bout lasting roughly 17.3 seconds, the longest since 2017 and nearly twice the length of last season’s tussles.

Not only are the run-ins taking longer to play out, but they’re also materializing earlier. Of the 11 postseason scraps, eight occurred in the opening period. From 2011 to 2019, less than one-third of postseason scraps occurred in the first 15 minutes, while 56 percent happened in the final period. Thus far, there hasn’t been a fight waged in the final 15 minutes.

This comes as fight frequency leaguewide has tapered off over the years and nosedived over the past decade. Total regular-season fights plummeted from 803 over the 2001-02 campaign to 195 this season. The league’s low-water mark has been set in three consecutive seasons. Where a fan 10 years ago had a coin-flip chance of attending a fracas, the modern-day one has less than a 17 percent chance of watching athletes drop the mitts.

There’s a certain ritual to curated violence in the NHL, much of which is traced back to an amorphous code. Officials seldom step in to stop a fight unless one participant is being pounded into a vegetable or until the fighters bring the action literally down to the ice.

Some say fighting has no place in the sport, while others would counter that a certain degree of on-ice policing is required. But an influx of skill at every position in an offensive-minded league has largely rendered the prototypical enforcer a dying breed. And while there are still plenty of missing teeth in the NHL, and all-league bodyguards like Ryan Reaves of the Vegas Golden Knights and Milan Lucic of the Calgary Flames are very much willing to grant someone a one-way ticket into the boards, fisticuffs are no longer a player’s primary occupation.

With the second round underway, four of the top 11 fighters this season³ remain in the bubble. But will the sparring continue?

Like their NBA peers, NHL athletes are leaving the two bubble arenas and mostly returning to the same hotels. If players have gotten sick of one another, expect it to only get worse in the coming weeks. Any simmering testosterone from the league’s hiatus is long gone, but players will continue to search for ways to energize the team.

The lack of a crowd has created an energy void for players, but it also means that barbs are no longer muted; players can literally hear opponents chirping during games. And the emotions of postseason hockey certainly don’t diminish as teams advance into the later rounds.

Fighting has recently gone quiet, with the latest official fight coming on Aug. 14. But considering this postseason’s uptick, that’s a trend that may not continue for too much longer.

As Sergachev put it after his exhibition altercation with Boyle, “That’s playoff hockey.”