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The best of the “bests”: Ranking the top draft classes of each decade

By Scott Esposito

11 JUN 1994: CANUCKS FORWARD JOHN MCINTYRE IS DUMPED BY RANGERS DEFENSEMAN BRIAN LEETCH DURING THE SECOND PERIOD OF GAME SIX OF THE STANLEY CUP FINALS IN VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA. Mandatory Credit: Mike Powell/ALLSPORT
11 JUN 1994: CANUCKS FORWARD JOHN MCINTYRE IS DUMPED BY RANGERS DEFENSEMAN BRIAN LEETCH DURING THE SECOND PERIOD OF GAME SIX OF THE STANLEY CUP FINALS IN VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA. Mandatory Credit: Mike Powell/ALLSPORT /
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NEW YORK, NY – 1973: Gene Carr #9 and Mike Murphy #14 of the New York Rangers fight with Dave Schultz #8 and Andre Dupont #28 of the Philadelphia Flyers as Bill Clement #10 of the Flyers looks on circa 1973 at the Madison Square Garden in New York, New York. (Photo by Melchior DiGiacomo/Getty Images)
NEW YORK, NY – 1973: Gene Carr #9 and Mike Murphy #14 of the New York Rangers fight with Dave Schultz #8 and Andre Dupont #28 of the Philadelphia Flyers as Bill Clement #10 of the Flyers looks on circa 1973 at the Madison Square Garden in New York, New York. (Photo by Melchior DiGiacomo/Getty Images) /

Style of Play

In the 1970s, the NHL featured a compelling mix of players with brute strength, blazing speed, and finesse. Some had a wild side – like the ten players arrested for various on-ice transgressions.

Expansion from 12 teams to 17 provided opportunities for marginal hockey players to find NHL jobs as enforcers. In the Original Six era, most star players fought for themselves. Expansion changed that, making players with stone hands a commodity for many teams.

Bench-clearing brawls became commonplace – and that embarrassed NHL suits. By the late 1970s, the league’s brass had seen enough and implemented a “third-man-in” rule designed to keep fights from escalating into full-blown brawls.

Players continued to fight their way to NHL jobs well into the new millennium – though not without more conditions.

Some ten years after implementing the “third-man-in” rule, the league decided that any players leaving the bench to join a bout would be subject to suspension. In 1992, the league imposed the “instigator” rule, adding a two-minute minor and game misconduct for any player deemed to have initiated a fight.

HockeyFights.com has tracked fighting in seven categories in every season since 2000-01 (covering games played, fights, games with fights, percentage of games with fights, games with more than one fight, and the number of players who fought).

The site doesn’t have comprehensive stats for seasons prior to 2000-01. However, its archive section has an unofficial count of fighting majors for each team for most seasons (but not every) since 1957-58.

The number of fighting majors spiked from 290 among twelve teams in 1969-70 to 941 from seventeen clubs in 1978-79. Twenty-one squads combined for 1,380 fighting majors in 1982 and 1,533 in 1990. And in 1998-99, twenty-seven units compiled 1,304 fighting majors.

Fighting was a major part of the game into the millennium. From 2000-01 through 2009-10, the NHL average 669 fights per season.

However, fighting has sharply declined since 2010, as the NHL made speed and scoring a priority in an effort to showcase talent and appeal to the casual hockey fan.

In the 2008-09 regular season, the percentage of games with a fight was 41.4. By 2018-19, that number was down to 15.3 percent.

Fighting remains in today’s game. Most of it, however, is done on social media.

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