Fights are up significantly early in the 2026-27 NHL season.<\/p>\n
One week into the new campaign, there have been 21 fights in 52 games, a rate of 0.403 fights per contest.<\/p>\n
Last season, there were a total of 307 fights in 1,343 games, or 0.23 fights per game, a rate nearly half of what\u2019s being seen early this season.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a small sample size but there\u2019s a 50 per cent uptick to this point in the season in fighting. I think there\u2019s an easy explanation to that,\u201d TSN Hockey Insider Darren Dreger said on Insider Trading on Tuesday<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWinnipeg Jets<\/a> fans now know who Tyrel Bauer<\/a> is and this guy has now fought a couple of times. You have Nathan MacKinnon<\/a>, a veteran for the Colorado Avalanche<\/a>, you\u2019re not used to him doing this, but he\u2019s done it to this point of the regular season.<\/p>\n \u201cNo alarms, it\u2019s just more competitiveness in the early part of the new year.\u201d<\/p>\n Bauer, a rookie with the Jets, introduced himself to the league with a pair of fights over his first two NHL games, dropping the gloves with Boston Bruins<\/a>\u2019 Mark Kastelic<\/a> on Friday and Detroit Red Wings<\/a>\u2019 Keegan Kolesar<\/a> on Sunday.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know, it goes a lot more than just the actual physical act of fighting,\u201d he said in a post-game interview with TSN\u2019s Danielle Bain. \u201cYou know, I\u2019ve been fighting a long time to get here. I\u2019ve stayed in that fight. That was for my teammates, that was for my family, that was for this city, for keeping faith in me.\u201d<\/p>\n Two of the more surprising combatants early in the season have been veteran forwards MacKinnon and Mark Stone<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Colorado Avalanche<\/a> superstar dropped the gloves with defenceman Brandt Clarke<\/a> in the team\u2019s opener against the Los Angeles Kings<\/a>. It was the ninth fight of MacKinnon\u2019s NHL career and first since 2022.<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, it happens,\u201d MacKinnon said postgame. \u201cIt\u2019s an intense game. Obviously, he didn\u2019t say a great word to me, so I didn\u2019t like the word. Yeah, we fought.\u201d<\/p>\n Stone took on Seattle Kraken<\/a> blueliner Brandon Montour<\/a> on Tuesday night, after a hit from Montour knocked Golden Knights\u2019 forward Victor Olofsson<\/a> out of the game.<\/p>\n \u201cWe took care of business when we needed to take care of business,\u201d Stone said after the game. \u201cHe was saying some things about our team I didn\u2019t like. I\u2019m not gonna fight too many 5-on-3s, but I just didn\u2019t like some of the things he was saying about the team.\u201d<\/p>\n Fighting in the NHL has held at a steady level since the 2021-22 season, as each season has held between 0.23 and 0.25 fights per game. If the current rate holds, it will be the most fight-filled season since the 2012-13 season, which contained 0.47 per game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fights are up significantly early in the 2026-27 NHL season. One week into the new campaign, there have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":924291,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[712,49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-924290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-apple-news","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=924290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924290\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/924291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=924290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=924290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=924290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}