Fights in pro hockey do not deter greater violence, research shows
Allowing fights between players in the National Hockey Leagues will not deter greater violence in the modern game, a new study has found.
In fact, teams and players who fight more often are also responsible for a disproportionate number of violent penalties across the league.
The results refute league officials’ arguments for continuing to fight in the game, said Michael Betz, author of the study and associate professor of humanities at Ohio State University.
“The issue of fighting is polarizing within the hockey community and for casual fans. As a former hockey player and researcher, I wanted to see if the arguments in support of fighting held up,” said Betz, who played as a college goalie at Ohio State and briefly as a professional in the ECHL (East Coast Hockey League).
“What I found was that none of the approaches I tried produced any evidence that fighting or even the threat of fighting deters more violent play in the NHL.”
The study was published today (June 22, 2022) in the journal PLOS ONE.
The issue is especially important now with the increased understanding of the consequences of traumatic brain injury, Betz said.
“Fighting increases the risk of brain injury but is not essential to hockey and removing it would not fundamentally change the sport,” he said.
For the study, Betz examined data on all regular season penalties from 2010 through 2019. He divided penalties into tactical penalties (designed to give a player a strategic advantage) and violent penalties, which are aimed at intimidating or injuring players . an opponent.
Violent punishments included boarding fines, assaults, elbowing, front bashing and large hurdles. If fighting were a deterrent, it should reduce the number of violent penalties that could injure a player, Betz said.
Overall, fights in the NHL decreased dramatically during the period of the study, with the 2018-2019 season seeing 65% fewer fights per game than the 2010-2011 season. Much of that decline is attributed to the league having access to faster, experienced players and needing fewer players who rely on intimidation.
But if fighting is necessary as a deterrent, there should have been an increase in violent punishment as the number of fights decreased. But the exact opposite happened. Although all types of punishment decreased during the study period, violent punishment fell more than twice as fast as tactical punishment (25% versus 12%), the study found.
Another team-level analysis also showed that fighting did not protect a team’s players from more violent play: in fact, each additional fight a team was involved in was associated with more violent penalties taken against them.
“If anything, the fighting seemed to encourage more violence against teams involved in brawls,” Betz said.
Even within games, the results showed similar patterns. Betz found that the number of violent penalties in a match increased instead of decreased after a fight.
The study also found that a fight between two teams early in a season did not significantly reduce the number of violent penalties in a second match between the teams later that season.
One possible explanation is that having a top fighter on your team who can take on any opponent in a fight reduces violence against the fighting player’s team. Betz investigated this by looking at the three players who had the most fights in the 2018/19 season (6) and a player who had one (5) fewer fights that year.
Whether or not these top fighters were in the lineup had no statistically significant effect on the number of violent penalties their opponents imposed on their teams, the results showed.
If fighting ever deterred more blatant violence against players, this study shows that is no longer the case in the modern NHL, Betz said.
“The league may have other reasons why they want to keep fighting in the game – there is evidence that more fighting increases the number of fans at matches,” he said.
“But they just need to get that out there and not hide behind the deterrent effect, because there is no evidence for that.”
Betz said he is particularly concerned about the junior hockey leagues in the United States and Canada, which serve as the main training ground for players ages 16 to 19 who aspire to play in college and the professional ranks. These junior leagues follow the NHL’s lead and, unlike colleges, allow fighting.
“These younger players are not getting paid, and their developing brains are more vulnerable to traumatic brain injuries. The evidence shows that fighting does not protect them from other violence, so there is a real ethical issue here if the fighting continues,” he says . said.
