Why is punching allowed in hockey

This is done intentionally to enable the Referee to differentiate between the obvious degrees of responsibility of the participants either for starting the fighting or persisting in continuing the fighting. A game misconduct penalty for all age classifications shall be assessed to any player whose actions during an altercation causes the removal of an opponent's helmet and facemask. The player or goalkeeper shall be suspended for his team's next two scheduled games.

This two-game suspension is in addition to any other required suspensions incurred during the same incident. Why punching your opponent in hockey is fine but spitting on him is not. It's good Don Cherry is gone.

It'll be better if his successor represents today's Canada. Read more. Reuse this content. You just kind of have to be out there, feel it out and make a decision. Fighting used to be much more prevalent in the sport. It was valued to such a degree that players who could barely produce offensively and got very little playing time were felt to be a necessity in the lineup.

That's just the way it was, their tough guy vs. That's gone now. Hockey is a contact sport so it is impossible to react after every hit, but if it is believed a player has crossed the line between physical and dirty, then he will have to answer for it.

A very recent example came on Jan. Gudas delivered a shoulder check right to the chest of Nic Dowd that knocked Dowd to the ice. If you see a teammate take a dirty play, then you are expected to respond. From the other end, if you deliver a big hit, you are not going to be caught off guard when the other team comes after you.

As seen from Elle some grudges can carry over from a prior game. Wilson was suspended in the preseason for a hit he delivered to St.

Louis Blues forward Oskar Sundqvist. When the Capitals played St. Louis in January for the first time since that hit, Wilson dropped the gloves with Blues defenseman Robert Bortuzzo in a fight that felt a lot more motivated by the Sundqvist hit than anything that was happening during the game. Wilson was engaged with another Blues player when Bortuzzo injected himself into the conversation and sparked a fight. While most fights may start with players standing up for teammates, hockey has not completely lost the old enforcer mentality.

It has simply evolved. The typical fourth line enforces of the past are gone as everyone is expected to produce in the current era of the sport, but teams also cannot be without someone willing to drop the gloves to defend his teammates.

So when something happens, you go into Ottawa, you look at their lineup, it's a guy like [Mark Borowiecki], he's probably the guy that would fight if something happened. There's that understanding. I'm not going to go grab someone else on their team like the young [Brady Tkachuk] kid.