Hickey on hockey: NHL needs to beef up fight deterrents

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It’s time for the National Hockey League to take a fresh look at how it deals with fights.

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There are fewer fights than a decade ago and there are fewer one-dimensional players who collected a paycheck for nights they spent more time in the penalty box than on the ice.

But there are still too many stupid fights that shouldn’t happen. There was one such incident in Thursday’s game between the Canadiens and the Chicago Blackhawks.

Alexander Romanov has became the tough defender the Canadiens envisioned when they drafted him in the second round (No. 38 overall) of the KHL in 2018. He ranks eighth in the NHL in hits, with 112, and one of them was a bone -Thunderous control over Sam Lafferty at the end of the second period.

It was a textbook hit, a shoulder-to-shoulder hit as Lafferty tried to drive along the boards. These are the kind of shots that make players think twice before testing a defender and making it a clean shot.

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That didn’t stop Ryan Carpenter from deciding he had to get revenge. He headed straight for Romanov and started throwing punches. It was a fight Romanov neither wanted nor needed.

When the brief encounter ended, the referees were right. They gave Carpenter two more minutes as a firebrand and the Canadiens took their only lead of the game when Mike Hoffman scored Montreal’s first power play goal since Nick Suzuki scored Dec. 4 at Nashville.

The injustice in this case is that Romanov had to spend five minutes in the penalty box for serving as a punching bag for Carpenter, and therein lies the problem.

There are too many fights where a player has to answer for a clean check. The only stupider fights are the ones that happen when a team falls behind and someone decides they have to fight to give their team a boost. They rarely have the desired effect, particularly when the assailant is hit.

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There is a misconception that hockey is the only sport that allows fighting, but the rule book clearly states: You shall not fight. But the players keep putting down the gloves because there are usually no repercussions. In most fights, both players are gone for five minutes and the only advantage is when a quarter-row escorts the opponent’s top scorer into the box.

There is no place to fight in this game. The NHL has cracked down on hits to the head, but doesn’t see a problem with players aiming for the head with punches.

If the NHL wants to get rid of fighting, and I’m sure there are some people who don’t, it should provide a deterrent.

One small step would be to impose more penalties on instigators and clarify the rule that adds a penalty for misconduct. Carpenter was given a 10-minute misconduct for being the instigator and Canadiens head coach Dominique Ducharme was right to wonder why Carpenter wasn’t labeled an aggressor, which would have resulted in in-game misconduct.

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Maybe it’s time for the NHL’s player safety folks to look into the most egregious infractions and hand out fines or suspensions. And maybe it’s time to adopt the US college rule, which calls for an automatic one-game suspension.

Rask will get his concoction: When Tuukka Rask was recovering from hip surgery last summer, he told a radio audience. that he would be a cheap addition to the Bruins’ roster when he was ready to return, joking that he would play for $250,000 and free Bud Light.

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