No team in the Western Hockey League has dropped the gloves this season more often than the Swift Current Broncos. Their 85 fighting majors are 8 more than any other team in the league and the second most in the entire CHL.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

If you're a fan of the hockey fight time may not be on your side. Two of the most powerful men in junior hockey made it clear this week they are part of a growing movement to keep the gloves on.

“The appetite is there,” Canadian Hockey League President David Branch told the New York Times. “The time is certainly right to move forward.”

Hockey Canada's President Bob Nicholson took an even stronger position.

“The official stance from Hockey Canada is that we want to get rid of fighting as quickly as we can,” Nicholson told the paper. “Our ultimate goal is to remove fighting.”

If that's the direction the sport is going, it doesn't have the support of Broncos Coach and General Manager Mark Lamb.

“I hope they don't take it out of hockey,” Lamb said. “The fight is just another way of bringing emotion and grit to the game.”

Fighting has been a part of junior hockey for as long as there has been junior hockey. The debate about its place in the game has also raged on for just as long.  Growing concern about concussions and the deaths of three former NHL and WHL tough guys (Wade Belak, Rick Rypien and Derek Boogaard) have added fuel to the fire.

“One of the causes of concussions is fighting,” Branch told the New York Times. “And I believe that there is more and more recognition that our game does not need fighting to survive, to be part of the entertainment package, you might say, because of the concerns of injuries and other concerns that could very well be a byproduct of fighting.”

Lamb doesn't buy that.

“We want the game to be safe,” Lamb said. “We want the head injuries to go away, but I'm not sure it's from fighting. We don't want anyone to get hurt, but are they getting hurt fighting? I don't think that's the cause.”

WHL Commission Ron Robison noted during his Family Day visit to Swift Current that the league is also concerned with developing players for their future in the NHL.

“One of our major responsibilities is preparing players for the next level,” Robison said. “Fighting is part of the professional game. We have a responsibility there to make sure the players understand what it takes in that particular aspect of the game. But having said that, obviously injuries are going to dictate everything as far as how we approach that.”

Lamb and Vancouver Giants Coach Don Hay share Robison's thinking.

“We follow the lead of the NHL,” Hay told the Vancouver Sun. “If they have fighting, I don't think it's fair to our players to not have them exposed to it. I mean, if you have no fighting in our league, then all of the sudden you're exposed to fighting at the NHL level, that makes it tough for your players to go into that league. The fighting aspect of their skill package could help them make a living at the next level.”

“If we're the best development league in the world why would we have different rules than the NHL?” argued Lamb. “To have a kid come up and go through junior and not have a fight, and be that type of the player that the NHL team wants him to be... I'm thinking that's the time where he could get really hurt.”

The WHL no longer reports specifics on injuries, but anecdotal evidence seems to point to an increase in the number of concussions and the amount of time players are missing due to head injuries. Recently Swift Current had as many as five players on the injured list at the same time with likely concussions. Shea Howorko and Jordan Evans have both yet to return to action in 2012. Although one can never be completely certain, it doesn't appear any of their injuries came as a result of fighting.

“One of the reasons that we have the number of concussions we do is we are doing a very good job of managing them,” Robison said.  “Detection levels are much better than they were before. So in past maybe where there hasn't been an injury that might have been detected, it is now. That's causing some of the numbers to increase.”

A common topic in the debate about fighting's place in hockey is whether or not its removal would lead to an increase in chippy or even dirty play.

“I think players (take more liberties) already (with) the instigating rule,” Lamb said. “When I played... you knew that at any time if you were going to go out there and take a liberty on somebody and take advantage of somebody that someone was going to come and fight you. Now you don't even have to worry about that. You can go out there and take a liberty on somebody, and now there's (an instigator) so if the guy comes over and does something to you he's going to get punished for it. Back then it was all policed.”

That's a position echoed by NHL star Milan Lucic of the Boston Bruins in the Vancouver Province.

“I think there will be more injuries because there’d be no fear of fighting," Lucic said. "The game will become dirtier. And, for myself, I don’t think I could have made the NHL the way I did without it.”

Robison points out that fighting is down in the WHL this season. According to the website hockeyfights.com, in 2010-2011 there were 10 teams over the 80 fight mark. In 1997-98 every team in the WHL had over 80 fights and Medicine Hat even topped the 200 mark. Yet with only two weeks of hockey left in 2011-2012, only the Broncos have fought over 80 times.

Meanwhile, the enforcer seems to be an endangered species. There were 7 players with over 30 fights in 1997-98. There isn't a single one yet this season. Andy Blanke is Swift Current's most frequent combatant. He has only fought in 31% of his team's games. However, in 97-98 Andrew Milne fought over 50% of the time he hit the ice for the Broncos.

A one-time tough guy, Milne is now the head coach for Canmore in the AJHL, one of  the Western Canadian Junior A leagues that have already taken the kinds of steps the CHL could be headed for. Before the 2010-2011 season, the SJHL, AJHL, BCHL and MJHL imposed a limit on acceptable numbers of fights. Once an individual player has racked up five fighting majors, the next fight would get him suspended for a game. The suspensions would then increase every time that same player dropped the gloves.

Under those rules 3 Broncos would have received multiple suspensions and another would be on the cusp.

The results were immediate. In BC, the penalty minute leader went from 204 in 2009-10 to 129 in the following season. The league's average attendance has also dropped by 4% in the first season of the rule changes and 1.6% in the second.

The Broncos are going against the flow. Swift Current went from 3 consecutive seasons bellow the 60 fight mark to 75 last season and 85 through only 65 games this season. The sport in general appears to be headed in the opposite direction.

Fighting is a becoming a smaller and smaller part of hockey every year. The question is whether the trend will continue naturally or if one of the game's more polarizing traditions will get snuffed out by power brokers.

Whether that will lead to a safer or more dangerous game is up for debate. Whether that will lead to a more or less popular sport is also up for debate. The only certainty is the debate will continue.

The gloves are off.





Shawn Mullin talked with WHL Commissioner Ron Robison about the subject of head injuries and fighting on a recent Broncos Broadcast on the Eagle 94.1.



Shawn talked with Broncos Coach and GM Mark Lamb about the possibility of eliminating fighting as the Broncos prepare to take on the Red Deer Rebels on Friday.

 

  The Broncos are in Red Deer on Friday night to play the Rebels. Our pre-game show will start at 8pm on The Eagle 94.1 FM.