Regardless of your stance on NHL fighting, this video is pretty shocking. I have a couple of quick points I would like to address regarding this multi-fight madness:

1. There should be clear-cut line between fights to change the momentum of the game and staged fights to beat the living hell out of the other team (aka fights off the face-off). Isn’t player safety more important than a fight about starting lineups and angry coaches before the game has even started?
2. If you are going to put a defenseman in the circle for the face-off, you are looking for trouble.
3. Ryan Carter is quite the bleeder.
4. Fights should not occur before anything in the game happens. Those coaches should be punished for that type of staged chaos. And Tortorella should be ashamed for yelling curses at DeBoer from the bench, real classy John.
5. This is not the first time these two teams have gone at it within the first couple seconds of the hockey game. It has actually happened twice already in the past year (December 2011 and February 2012). Shouldn’t something be done to stop this trend?
6. This kind of fighting is not ‘part of the game’. The NHL isn’t MMA fighting and there should not be mindless bashing-in of skulls without cause. Pierre Lebrun of ESPN said this about the fight: