Quote:
Originally Posted by Textcritic
I understand and accept that, thanks. And yes, I do tend to think that England's fight the other night worked out in the Flames favour. It certainly feels like it did.
I find that more recently I am framing the questions differently. It's less about whether or not a fight can impact a game—there do seem to be instances in which it does. My question is much more with regards to the necessity of fighting in hockey; with measuring its value against the consequences.
The title of Prust's article was "Why we fight." He answered it with a string of clichés that we have been hearing for a couple of decades now, but the whole piece, in my opinion, missed the point.
The title should have been "Should we fight?" And the answer to that question is only if it is necessary. Is it necessary in hockey? I am convinced that it is not.
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I didn't read the article, but what types of cliches? Like the stuff we heard from the Flames after the game about the "boost" or "feeling" it gave the team?
If you're looking for something to define that in statistics, it just won't show up, probably ever. The same reason we can't quantify love or hate, you can't quantify the affect one person or event has on another person emotionally. The only way you could get close to this is to have each player fill out a psych survey after each shift.
I think the thing that a lot of the stats miss (not just with fighting but overall) is that most sports are highly emotional, especially those where you and/or your teammates are putting their physical well-being on the line. The emotions of one player can completely swing a game in the favor (or vice versa) of the team. Why does it seem like stupid penalties get scored against more than effort-based penalties, or those that save goals? Why does a guy like Iginla have a reputation that says "don't piss him off, he'll take the game over"?
Now you could lay out stats that show that (numbers from my butt) Iginla scores in 20% of the games in which he fights, and use that to say that it obviously doesn't affect him because he scores in 30-40% of games anyways. Maybe it has a negative impact? But what this doesn't tell you is what exactly DOES get Iginla going? Maybe a fight doesn't boost him but a fight against a certain player, or in a certain rink gets him more jacked than others. What pisses off Iginla to the point that he impacts the game?
All players react differently to different things, and these emotional factors (IMO) can have the greatest impact on the overall game. The Flames comebacks are a perfect example. They have put in the minds of not just themselves, but the opponents as well, that they can and will come back. You can throw as many Adv Stats at it as you want, but you won't be able to quantify that psychological impact, which undeniably exists.