NHL Playoffs 2012: Penguins and Flyers Prove That Fighting Hinders Hockey

We're less than a week into the Stanley Cup playoffs and the rash of fighting across the NHL has already gotten out of hand...or am I missing something?

Case in point: The Philadelphia Flyers and the Pittsburgh Penguins combined for 158 penalty minutes during Game 3 of their Eastern Conference quarterfinal series, which saw Philly take a 3-0 lead on Pittsburgh with an 8-4 win.

That's right, folks, 158 penalty minutes. That's nearly 22 percent of all the available minutes spent in a penalty box.

Three players were ejected in the first period alone. The pugilism was so widespread that Claude Giroux and Sidney Crosby, the two most talented players in this series (if not the entire league), went at it.

I get that hockey is a tough guy sport. I get that there's a lot of puffing of chests and defending of turf and protecting of teammates and rectifying cheap shots. I get that the Flyers and the Pens hate each other on account of their long-standing Keystone State rivalry.

But at what point does the fighting simply take away from the game itself? At what point are the gloves dropped so often that hockey is no longer fun to watch? At what point does the game cease to be hockey and start to be a free-for-all street brawl, complete with sucker punches and blindside hits? 

Now, let me be totally transparent here. I'm not for fighting. I'm not for an aspect of the sport that promotes thuggish behavior, especially at the risk of jeopardizing brain health.

And especially for no good reason.

However, to crow about fighting of this sort and still be in favor of guys coming to blows on the ice ignores the notion that if you give big, aggressive men flying around on skates the leeway to fight at all, then if they really dislike each other, they'll brawl.

If you give 'em an inch, they'll take a mile, and boy, did both Pennsylvania teams ever take.

Granted, it's not entirely fair to mention the Flyers in the same breath as the Pens, considering it was Pittsburgh's players instigating much of the goonery.

Still, this sort of play can't be considered surprising so long as fighting is endorsed as part of the game, as much by the higher-ups as by the players and the coaches. So long as drawing opposing players into fights is a tactic for changing the tenor of the game, it will be pushed to the point of embarrassment.

So long as referees remain abdicant in the face of score settling (or are instructed to do so), these sorts of shenanigans will persist, disrupting the flow of the game and putting players' long-term well-being at unnecessarily grave risk.

Of course, most fighting in hockey doesn't get as ugly as it did between the Flyers and the Pens on Sunday.

But it can, and it will. Blood doesn't cool down; it only boils.

And so long as it's allowed to boil over through the so-called "diffusion" of fighting, the game and its players will continue to suffer.

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