from Eric Duhatschek of the Globe and Mail,

About the most sensible thing ever said about fighting – and its place in the NHL, past, present and future – came from former Boston Bruins general manager Harry Sinden almost two decades ago.

Responding to the widely held canard that fighting always was and is an integral part of the game, Sinden noted that the soldiers who invented the game by playing hockey on the frozen St. Lawrence River in the 19th century didn’t go onto the ice with the intention of starting a fight. Fighting gradually crept into the game, an unhappy part of its evolution, and according to Sinden, it can evolve right out again.

“If the wise men of today sat down and started a brand new hockey league, they wouldn’t include fighting,” Sinden said in an interview Friday. “They wouldn’t start off by saying, ‘Let’s let everybody fight and just give them a five-minute major.’ It wouldn’t fit today.

“How you ever get it out entirely, I don’t know, but they have opportunities to adjust things so these goons – and people who are only in the game to fight – could be limited and slowed down. That they could do.”

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