Early in the second period of Wednesday night’s Wild-Blackhawks game, tough guys Brad Staubitz and Daniel Carcillo dropped the gloves at center ice. Staubitz, representing Minnesota, got Carcillo’s helmet off, and late in the bout, he got inside Carcillo, got a good handful of jersey, and proceeded to pound Carcillo a few times before wrestling him to the ice.

I understand why this fight happened. The Wild, playing for the second time in two nights, had skated sleepily for the game’s first twenty-odd minutes, and Staubitz used his fists to get the team going. It worked, too, as Minnesota responded right away with its first good shift of the game. The Wild bench got fired up and the team seemed to wake up, and it was clear that Staubitz had done his job.

But here’s the part that gets me. Fighting in the NHL is supposed to be in defense of “the code,” where fighters defend the honor of skill players and police the other team’s bruisers by swinging fists. It’s treated as a respected, even honorable, part of the league. And I’m not going to try to argue that there aren’t situations in which a good brawl seems warranted – think of Brad May sucker-punching Kim Johnsson during the playoffs several years ago, or Chris Kunitz pulling Brent Burns’s hair during a pileup during that same Ducks-Wild series.

But it seems to me that most of today’s NHL fights don’t involve Dave Semenko looking out for Wayne Gretzky. Most of them seem to fall into one of two categories:

  1. Tough guy from Team A, trying to fire up his team or set an example or otherwise prove a point, challenges tough guy from Team B and they duke it out, gladiators in the middle of the ice.
  2. Player from Team A gets hit with a hard, but often legal, bodycheck. Another player from Team A rushes after the bodychecker from Team B and tries to immediately goad the checker into a fight.

The way fighting is supposed to work is that Team A is going after Team B for dangerous play – a hit to the head or a run at the goaltender, or something similarly designed to risk injury to an opposing player. But these situations don’t result in fights, they result in scrums and wrestling matches, as both teams pile in to the inevitable fray. The point of fighting – doling out eye-for-an-eye justice for headhunters and goons – is lost.

I get why fighting’s allowed in the NHL. And I agree that in some situations it may even be desirable. But legalizing these situations also means that sometimes one of the team’s guys has to fight just for playing physically, or even more stupidly, because somebody on the other team really, really wants to fight. And to me, the pointlessness of those fights may outweigh the occasional necessity of keeping fighting as a part of the game.