A quick look at fighting in the WHL

The Western Hockey League has come a long way since the years of bench clearing brawls. In those days, fighting was how you protected your stars and your goaltender, and your own ego. Gone are the days of players like Brent Gogol, who had 511 penalty minutes in 1977-78 and Mel Hewitt with his 508 in the same season. Both players were drafted, but did not play in the NHL. Even more recently, in 1990-91 Kerry Toporowski led the WHL in penalty minutes with 505.

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DUBNetwork was able to look at the occurrence of fighting in the WHL as far back as 1996-97 season, and we found that the number of fights has drastically dropped. The season during this span that had the most fights was 1997-98 with 2564 or 3.956 fight majors per game or about two fights per game. Medicine Hat led the way with 210 fighting majors  The team with the least fights was Kelowna with just 95.

 

princeGeorgeWith the various measures being brought in regarding head and brain injuries, the Western Hockey League has seen a drastic decline in the number of fights to the extent that there were only 784 fighting majors last season (2015-16). That works out to .9898 fighting majors per game or a fight every other game. Prince George had just 73 fighting majors to lead the way while Kootenay had just 19 all year.

The current season’s fight count is available at http://stats.dubnetwork.ca/ It has list that you can sort from the most to the least. Spokane is the current league leader with 27 fighting majors in 31 games.

One of the measures put in place that has had an impact is the instigator penalty.  The added two-minute minor penalty creates situations where a player may not want to defend his teammate after a bad check or incident where they may have become injured. While it has the desired effect of eliminating some of the fights, it may allow opposing players to take some liberties with star players and goaltenders thus potentially causing injuries to said players. The Western Hockey League has also done away with allowing fighters to intentionally remove their helmets when engaging in an altercation with another player. (WHL Official Rule Book Rule 46.6 http://whl.uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/chl_whl/2015/11/30/2015-2016_Rulebook.pdf)

DUBNetwork as an entity is neither a proponent for or against fighting in hockey. This article is strictly intended to illustrate the facts and the numbers as obtained from the WHL website. Those numbers, put into an easy to read format can be found here: http://stats.dubnetwork.ca/archives/fights