I Finally Found a Reason to Watch Hockey!

As a Chicagoan, it has been my duty to root for the Blackhawks through this great playoff run of theirs, but I gotta admit, hockey still just isn't my game.

It ranks comfortably behind basketball, football, baseball, and soccer on my list of personal favorites. Dodgeball would leapfrog it as well, if there were a professional dodgeball league, but then I wouldn't be stuck doing this for a living now, would I?

Anyway, thanks to the thorough douchiness of Chris Pronger (man, that's an easy guy to dislike! See his "bush league" puck stealing for exhibits A and B.), I started exploring the wonderful world of hockey fights today. My last experience with hockey fights was probably in NHL '95 for the Nintendo 64, where it involved a health bar and wannabe Street Fighter action. Good times.

Allow me to direct you, via the mysterious rabbit hole of YouTube, to one of my new favorite sites:

www.hockeyfights.com

It's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Only more so. There's a page specific to every team and every player, and even a 'top 25 fights of 2009-2010' section.

Blackhawks Fights

This one is probably the best, starring Adam Burish and Derek Dorsett (it rated a 6.8):



And, what's that you say? You'd like to see Flyers captain Mike Richards get his a** handed to him? Okay!



It's not that I love violence, but hockey is the only sport I can think of where the game happily transforms from one thing (hockey) to quite another (amateur boxing/flailing) and nobody minds. Can you imagine this happening in football? Somebody would die within a week! They sure as hell wouldn't be putting up a Tale of the Tape as the helmets dropped.

So yeah, go Hawks. And if somebody decides to take on Pronger, I wish them the best. Paging Dustin Byfuglien...

EDIT: Deadspin is on it. Ohhhh yes.