Rangers rookie vying to resurrect hockey fights
In 1988, the NHL averaged 1.1 fights per game. Last season, that number was down to 0.25 as the NHL's historically rough and bruising style has ceded prominence to the elite speed and skill that has come to dominate the modern game.
Through 940 games in the 2023-24 season (as of Thursday), there have been 222 fights, roughly 0.24 per game, in line with past seasons. Save for an occasional outlying year that skewed feisty, the Y-axis of NHL fights per game has been on a steady nosedive for two decades.
Fans of hockey fights fear not; your hero may have just arrived in the form of 6-foot-7 New York Rangers rookie Matt Rempe.
Rempe was selected in the sixth round of the 2020 NHL Draft and earned his first call-up for the Feb. 18 Stadium Series game between the Rangers and Islanders at MetLife Stadium.
Rempe shed the gloves just four seconds into his first shift, squaring up with Matt Martin in front of 79,690.
As is evident from the video above, the kid can fight. He's fought in three of his first six games, a small sample size yet double the NHL average.
His fighting renown has spread so fast that by his fourth game, Nicolas Deslauriers, the league leader in fights, approached him during warm-ups to request a fight during the game. Rempe, unsurprisingly, obliged.
While averaging five mins of ice time over six games is early data of an undefined set, two stats suggest Rempe's aggressive, fight-first, hockey-later mentality contains a component that will allow him to stick around: two points (one goal, one assist) in his past three games and a total +/- of two. He has yet to be on the ice for a goal scored against, which can be translated to mean that, so far, he is not a liability.
One cause of the downward trend in fighting that Rempe has been bucking was the 2005 rule change that took the automatic five-minute fighting major and added instigator penalties for anyone who flaunts the rules on how and when you can chuck knucks.
But no change has done more to diminish fighting than teams moving away from having a designated enforcer. Gone are the days when every team had a Bob Probert, a Tie Domi or a tough, young kid aspiring to be the next of their kind.
Teams kept enforcers to strike fear into other players and discourage them from finishing every last ounce of their checks. But they also kept them to deal with the other team's enforcers. Once a few teams moved away from having one, it made it easier for the rest to do so. These days, the enforcer is a relic of hockey's rougher, less cosmopolitan past.
Rempe won't single-handedly push the game back over one fight per game. But he very well could create the mold for a modern enforcer. He is big, strong and fearless. Yet, in addition to what he can do when the games stop and the gloves drop, he can also contribute to the action between the whistles.
March is when NHL teams start shifting into playoff mode. Everything gets a little faster, rougher and more serious.
For a surging Rangers team with elite scoring and playoff-proven goaltending, adding some old-school muscle to the mix might be one of the missing ingredients for the recipe to end their 30-year Stanley Cup drought.
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