Well, to be fair, my facetiousness wasn’t clear 
Well, it’s not just an anecdote, it’s pretty clear-cut truth. A third guy entering a fight would be suspended.
You forgot an important exception to that rule: if he plays for the President’s Trophy winners and goes after the opposition’s goalie, he gets off scot-free.
I don’t mind that you think that hockey sucks but that was a piss-poor rendering of “Eye of the Tiger”. Get your act together, will ya’?
There is always figure skating for people who don’t tonyharding want to watch brawls.
Me thinks alot of you miss the point. The players are the league. They are the NHL. Fighting will disappear when the players want it to end. A slow culture change is leading to that end.
Sure, culture is a huge part of it, and while it hasn’t changed enough to eliminate fighting, it is vastly different from when fighting peaked.
Don’t forget: North American leagues play in much smaller rinks (smaller ice surface) than do other Euro leagues. The players are more caged in, are more likely to grind and bump, and more likely to be frustrated. Also, a North American mucker/grinder, or an enforcer, can make his play passable on a smaller surface, so a team can burn a roster spot on him and guarantee a certain number of fights. On a larger ice surface, the skill level of most enforcers becomes such a liability that you are much less likely to carry one and/or use one.
So, Europe to NHL comparisons are not apples-to-apples.
I think there is a cause-effect confusion with most hockey-fight arguments.
People fight in hockey because it has been condoned for so long, that’s about it. It’s not very compelling to me to argue that the smaller skilled players need to be protected and that there is no other way to do this.
Think of the size differences in other sports, particularly football and basketball. Yet somehow guards are not routinely trampled by power forwards, and receivers are not sumoed by defensive linemen.
Think of the constant psychological warfare in soccer, where man-to man matchups are common, or the ability that a pitcher has to do terrible damage to a batter, or a batter being the only man on the field carrying a weapon, or the nut-grabbing and eye gouging that takes place in a struggle for a fumbled football.
Listen, I enjoy a hockey fight as much as the next guy, and that and only that is the reason why there are fights in hockey.
I’ve always wondered why it is allowed from a legal standpoint.
If I take a hockey stick and repeatedly smack someone in the face with it, with their teeth sprinkling the pavement, I’ll probably end up charged with assault and cooling my heels in the pokey. How does that work?
When I moved to Canada, I fell in love with the game. Then the fighting turned me off and I stopped watching. There is a TV commercial for hockey on one of the sports networks and they advertise something like: All the fights, all the goals, all the hits, in that order.
One aspect that no one mentioned is the refereeing. In the NHL only the referee can call a penalty (with certain technical exceptions like too many men on the ice). But the referee is also required to watch the puck at all times. So players away from the puck can get away with literally anything, right in front of linesman and never get called. There was a certain Red Wings superstar of former times who was the dirtiest player on the ice, always when he wasn’t near the puck. He would trip, slash, high stick any player who had checked him (legally) earlier in the game. Few players did. And some tried to start a fight with him, but he would back off and let an enforcer stand up for him.
Of course, they could stop fighting if they wanted to. What would happen to football if only the referee could call a penalty? If a football player fights he is ejected. I have seen entire baseball teams (except for 9 players on the field and the bullpen) ejected for brawling. The hockey powers that be are convinced that hockey are there to see fights break out. And maybe they are right. All the others have given up on the game. And they give air time to the revolting Don Cherry.
Players have been convicted for particularly egregious on-ice fouls.
However, if you were just to tackle somebody in the street like an NFL linebacker you’d be arrested for assault, too. The key is whether the action can be considered a legitimate part of the game or not. In professional hockey, fights are.
I’ve just remembered this case in which it was ruled that a hockey player who was injured in a fight was entitled to workers’ compensation, because “fighting is an integral part of the game of hockey”. For the same reason, a hockey fight is not considered assault.
In hockey they absolutely cannot use their stick in a fight or in fact in any aggresive way. Players have been charged and convicted because of it (Marty McSorley, for example).
In European hockey, fighting has never been a major part of the game. It has happened, and still happens, but it’s quite unusual that players fight with each others, however rough the game gets. This unwillingness to take a fight also made North American hockey fans scorn the first European pros during the seventies, being “chickens” and all. (Yes, a bit pathetic, but there you go.) Even real tough guys like Börje Salming was known as “chicken Swede”, since he played hockey, took the hits, got up, played hockey - but never got into a fight. In Swedish hockey this was never a tradition.
This has also traditionally been used by mainly the Canadian hockey team in international games, where they’ve been trying to frighten the European opponent by using violence during the game - sometimes successful, sometimes not.
In short, fighting in hockey is mainly an American/Canadian tradition, though not unheard of in Europe, where the occational fight takes place (especially during play offs); it’s not “banned” in European hockey AFAIK.
[There was a certain Red Wings superstar of former times who was the dirtiest player on the ice, always when he wasn’t near the puck. He would trip, slash, high stick any player who had checked him (legally) earlier in the game. Few players did. And some tried to start a fight with him, but he would back off and let an enforcer stand up for him.]
Are you trying to say “Gordie Howe”?
Could someone please explain to a non-basketball person?
I’m almost certain it’s the Tomjanovich punch. An excellent summary I found at http://www.franklin.com/estore/dictionary/BBTW0759570108DLDA/:
John Feinstein:
When a fight broke out between the Houston Rockets and the L.A. Lakers one night in 1977, All-Star Rudy Tomjanovich raced to break it up. He was met by Kermit Washington’s fist, which delivered one of the most ferocious punches ever seen in sports. The punch dislodged Tomjanovich’s skull, and required years of surgeries and therapy to get him back to normal. He was never the same again. Washington was an average player for the Lakers, 6 foot 8, and one of six athletes in the history of the NCAA to be both an academic all-American and a basketball all-American. By all accounts he was an exemplary man, but the split second in which he threw his fist toward Tomjanovich devastated his reputation. Every team in the NBA has refused to hire him in any coaching capacity. Tomjanovich, on the other hand, is a star: head coach of the two-time world championship Rockets, and coach of the 2000 gold medal US Olympic team.
Thank you very much Woody. I prolly never heard of it 'cause that ws the year I graduated HS. Herb, and all that. 
The other thing about hockey is that it’s just too competitive. What does that teach our kids? Why must there always be a loser? We should make the game more cooperative.
And we should change the name of hockey sticks to ‘peace sticks’. They could be used to give players back scratches or maybe cooperatively fashioned together to make beautiful shapes on the ice. Maybe all the players could learn to just skate around and put on a display of cooperative synchronized skating or something. Then at the end, everyone gets a medal and is told they’re just the best ever, and everyone can leave the rink with higher self-esteem, which we all know is very important.
Having hung around rinks, if you want to see some screwed up kids and some whack-job parents, go to a district or regional figure skating competition.