Quote:
Originally Posted by Huntingwhale
Why do you need studies or stats to prove anything? If a Calgary Flame or any other NHL player says the fight changed the tide of the game, then it changed the tide of the game. It's as black and white as that. I'm not sure what you're trying to argue. If a player who is actually on the ice and plays the game says it made a difference, then it just bloody does. I'll take Kris Russell's word over internet stats any day. There's nothing to debate really. Not everything needs to be charted or made into some statistic. Sometimes players see a fight, their teammate wins it, and something in their brains just clicks to give them that extra adrenaline push. Who cares about measuring it. It happens.
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Itse's point here is that there is a big difference in what someone believes and what actually is. We are required—all of us—to form beliefs about everything every day. A great number of them align perfectly with reality, but a surprising number do not, and this is true of everyone, including NHL defensemen.
What Kris Russell
believes is not necessarily the same thing as
what actually happened. Russell clearly
believes that Engelland's fight "changed the tide of the game." It might have, or it might not have. We can't know apart from developing a useful metric to systematically measure, analyse, and evaluate these events within a game. What Itse and others are getting at is that 1) there is not any evidence one way or the other to suggest that a fight will have any measurable impact on a hockey game. And 2) any impact that occurs in a hockey game that is attributed to a fight is inescapably an instance of unwarranted correlation without proof of causation. No one questions whether or not players believe in the affect of fighting—this is well established. There are some of us who raise legitimate questions about whether those beliefs are justified. Until there is corroborative, testable, repeatable evidence one way or the other, these remain unsubstantiated beliefs whether they belong to a player, a coach, an analyst, the Dalai Lama, or a fan.