To Fight or Not To Fight

It's easy to criticize a decision after the fact, when you know something did not turn out well. Chris Stewart broke his hand last week in a fight with Kyle Brodziak of the Minnesota Wild, an injury that will have the Avs' young power forward out for 4-6 weeks. Had Stewart not broken his hand in the fight, fans would probably have been praising Stewart for his pretty one-sided beating of the Wild player. However, Stewart did break his hand which puts his team in a pretty tough spot.

The question a lot of folks have been asking is this: should a star player ever drop the gloves? Ideally, the answer would be no. It's an easy way for a play to get injured and miss some games. When Matt Duchene dropped his gloves for his first ever NHL fight, a lot of fans were excited, but some were probably cringing, hoping that he didn't hurt one of his hands in the altercation. Duchene was not injured, so nothing bad really came of the fight. Then Chris Stewart dropped the gloves, as he has done multiple times in the past and broke his hand in the process. So it would seem that you don't want your more skilled players fighting.

It's one thing when a player like David Koci is injured in a fight. His main role on the team is to play a few minutes in a game and stick up for his teammates if needed (his effectiveness in fights is another story altogether). If Koci gets hurt during a fight, he's not leaving a huge hole in the roster that will be tough to fill. Call up any guy from Lake Erie to take on some of the minutes and you're okay.

When a player on the top line such as Chris Stewart drops the gloves and injures himself, the team is in a position where they might trouble filling in for him. At the time of his injury, Stewart was the team's leading goal scorer with 11 goals (now tied by David Jones and both Milan Hejduk and Paul Stastny have 10 goals). In the few games since Stewart's injury the Avs have not won a single game. They've lost three games in overtime and one in regulation. The losses cannot entirely be blamed on Stewart not being in the lineup, but it certainly isn't helping the Avs.

Fighting in the NHL is always being debated and certainly when a star player gets hurt in a fight, it brings on more questions. Sometimes a player needs to drop the gloves to stick up for his teammates who don't want to fight. A fight can totally change the momentum of a game, so outlawing it altogether would be bad for the game. Certain players should probably not fight or at least not do it on a regular basis. Perhaps Chris Stewart really felt that he needed to stick up for a teammate because the Avs were already ahead in the game. He probably regrets the decision now that he will be missing so much hockey. It was a single moment in a game and it ended up badly, but it doesn't mean that Chris Stewart should never fight again. Maybe in the future he will think twice before dropping the gloves.