Hockey players punch each other in the head less often than they used to. In the 1980s, ’90s, and 2000s, it was common for the NHL to have 700 or 800 fights per season, based on tracking from the iconic fight-tracking site HockeyFights.com. The numbers have been on a consistent wane since 2014–15, when the site recorded 391 fights. They have dipped below 200 in a few recent seasons, and this year look poised to come in around 300. In the old days, there was a fight a little bit more often than once every two games. Now there’s a fight in more like 1 in 5. Fighting is not even close to being out of the sport, but it doesn’t seem as if it will ever be as prominent as before.
Dumb people will always have robust representation in hockey culture, so the sport will never be rid of fighting nor of those who insist that it’s an important part of the culture. But they are losing the battle. Some of the league’s most famous enforcers have died young, and there’s horrifying yet unsurprising evidence that fighting has contributed. Today’s players, coaches, and executives understand that concussions are a scourge. Hockey will always have flare-ups after the whistle and will always see spillovers of physical play into extracurricular violence, but the preplanned bouts between two fighters squaring up and taking off their gloves and helmets? Those have fallen out of vogue. That is good for the safety of the humans playing the sport, and it’s good for hockey’s reputation too. When this stuff gets truly ugly, it’s an unappealing look for a league that’s never as popular as it wants to be.
But here is the funny thing about fighting in hockey: You should hate the game but love the players. Hockey enforcers can be some of the loveliest dudes in the game when they are not trying to knock each other’s brains out of their ears. They are almost always among the most beloved guys in a locker room, valorized for taking on the ritual of sticking up for teammates. But they are also a fading breed, a result of the correct “Head injuries are bad” sentiment that has taken over society. Which means that the last of them must be treasured. And currently, hockey is enjoying a moment by one of the last of these guys to ever do it. He plays five minutes a game. He is one of the most compelling shows on ice at the moment. And we should enjoy watching the last of these players undertake a dangerous activity. For one, they won’t stop if we don’t. Two, if we don’t appreciate what they’re doing, they’ll be risking their safety for nothing.
New York Rangers pugilist Matt Rempe is not doing it for nothing. The 21-year-old call-up from the American Hockey League has appeared in nine games in his rookie season. He has tallied one goal and one assist in not quite six minutes of ice time per night. He has seen less than one minute of power-play time and not a single second on the penalty kill. But he is one of the buzziest players in hockey at the moment, because he is both fighting with unusual frequency for this era and riling up opponents with dirty play. I am not sure if the spectacle of Rempe is ultimately good or bad, but he is a hockey player in a time machine. They do not make ’em like him anymore.
Rempe has fought four times in his first nine NHL games. In his debut game, against the neighboring Islanders, he decisively beat up the Islanders’ Matt Martin—a good first step toward Ranger cult heroism. In his third game, he took a much grimmer step toward the same status when he threw a vicious arm into the head of the New Jersey Devils’ Nathan Bastian, who was simply playing the puck. (Officials rightly threw Rempe out of the game.) In the next game, the rookie scored his first goal and fought again, lacking only an assist to net the vaunted Gordie Howe hat trick. In Rempe’s four official fights (the ones in which he dropped the gloves and squared up with the other guy, as opposed to just some pushing and shoving), he has one clear win, one clear loss, and a couple of slogs that were more or less a draw. That’s according to the HockeyFights.com voters, who are the world authority on hockey fight decisions. Rempe’s go with Philadelphia’s Nicolas Deslauriers was some real Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots stuff, with both players landing a bevy of punches. Watching Rempe is macabre, and one’s tolerance for the spectacle depends on what they like about hockey. If they (like me) prefer the speed and skill of the best players in the world, Rempe’s shtick is nearly useless. If they watch the game with a certain bloodlust, Rempe is the kind of guy who quenches it. And whether there is room for Rempe in the middle depends on how good one thinks he is at actual hockey, the parts that involve skating and shooting and passing rather than punching.
Is Rempe a useful player or just a sideshow? It’s borderline. He’s 6-foot-7 and 241 pounds, more NBA power forward–sized than hockey-sized. In the past decade, front offices have figured out that hockey is a speed game and physical brutality is only so worthwhile. He did score a handful of goals in each of the past few years in the minor leagues, though, and his first NHL goal demonstrated a deft ability to stand in front of the goalie while being 6-foot-7 and have a puck bounce off him and into the net. Being 6-foot-7 is a skill. And Rempe, in his small sample size of appearances to date, has not appeared to kill the Rangers’ ability to hold on to the puck. Still, the Rangers will soon be in the Stanley Cup playoffs, and it does not feel much better than 50–50 that he will get a jersey for those games. Fighters are regular-season players.
But Rempe may not have to be a good player to fulfill a useful role for the sport: that of the player on a New York team who gets people talking. Hockey is in a perpetual war to mainstream itself, even when the games are at Madison Square Garden. The Rangers have had plenty of superstars in the past 30 years, from Mark Messier to late-career Wayne Gretzky to the legendary goaltender Henrik Lundqvist. But the NYR haven’t had a big star for the better part of the past decade, since Lundqvist started to fade. (No disrespect meant to Artemi “The Bread Man” Panarin, an excellent scorer whose only notoriety to non–hockey fans stems from the time Vladimir Putin tried to frame him for sexual assault.) Rempe is not having a Linsanity run, but he is enough of an attraction that generalist publications want news articles about him and non–hockey fans are broadly wondering, What is that guy’s deal? A fourth-line plugger getting into some fights will not fundamentally alter the sport or explode its audience, but hockey will take what it can get.
The most compelling thing about the Rempe moment is the unanswerable question of how long it might last. He’ll stop being a news story soon, but how long will he stick in the NHL? If it’s a good amount of time, will he have to keep throwing haymakers to stay in the league? That could quickly become a lot of shots to take to the head, and there are very, very few pure fighters these days who manage to stay in the league for a long time. Most of them have to also be good at the more hockey parts of hockey. Gravity will push Rempe toward less fighting and more forechecking, but in hockey, gravity takes a little while to enter a room. Fighting will continue until morale declines—or till the Rangers make Rempe a healthy scratch.
