Tooth for a tooth: Does fighting serve as a deterrent to greater violence in the modern NHL.

Tooth for a tooth: Does fighting serve as a deterrent to greater violence in the modern NHL.

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Fighting has been part natio glide on eyeshadow stick of the fabric of the NHL for nearly a century.Recent sharp declines in the frequency of fighting and increased understanding of the long-term consequences of traumatic brain injuries have led many to question whether fighting still has a place in the modern NHL.League commissioner Gary Bettman as recently as 2019 testified before Canadian Parliament that fighting has a deterrent effect, reducing the overall level of violent and dangerous plays within the game.

This study empirically examines this claim and tests whether fighting indeed serves as a deterrent to undesirable behaviors in the NHL.I examine data on all regular season penalties from 2010-2019 to determine whether fighting and the threat of fighting is empirically related the level of violence in NHL games.Using a mix of descriptive and quasi-experimental approaches, I find no quantifiable evidence that fighting serves as a deterrent to undesirable violent behaviors in sheepshead bay boats the NHL.

To the contrary, I find that teams and players who fight are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the violent penalties that happen across the league.These results have implications for player safety in the many professional-and especially junior-hockey leagues around the world that sanction in-game fighting.