NHL proposes rule to stop ‘staged fights’

The National Hockey League proposed a rule to triple the penalty for staged fights during games, the North American professional ice hockey league said.

The rule would add 10 minutes to the current five for fighting staged-fight penalty, the NHL said at its general managers meeting in Naples, Fla.

The proposal is partly a response to recent fight-related injuries and tragedies, including the death of Ontario Hockey League player Don Sanderson in January, The Christian Science Monitor said.

Sanderson, who died a month after his head hit the ice during a fight, is the first player whose death was attributed directly to a hockey fight.

But the proposal also illustrates how desperate the league is to achieve acceptance as a top U.S. sport while holding onto its Canadian blue-collar roots and pugilistic traditions, the newspaper said.

NHL brass want to have it both ways, Duke University sports anthropologist Orin Starn told the newspaper.

The question members of the NHL Board of Regents now face: Do they want to have this spectacle of goons whaling on each other or do they want to promote hockey through the beauty of the game and the skill it demands? Starn asked.

The proposed rule would leave it to officials to decide if a fight is staged or not, the NHL said.

More than 24,000 fights have been fought over NHL history, said hockeyfights.com, a fan site that rates fights and posts videos of them.