Woke mob cancels fighting

The woke mob appears to be at it again.

That’s how some are reacting to news that the Quebec Major Hockey League — one of the top feeders to the NHL and where Sidney Crosby, Mario Lemieux and countless other stars learned their craft— will be banning fighting next season.

And when they say banned, they mean just that.

Get into a fight and you just won’t be sitting for five minutes. No, you’ll be ejected from the game. Worse, you might even be suspended.

Sacre bleu! Say it ain’t so!

The details still need to be finalized and already there’s been opposition, mostly from old-school hockey fans and retired goons like Luke Gadzic, who says he would never have made it to the NHL if he weren’t allowed to fight in junior. Complain all you want, but it’s happening. And it shouldn’t be surprising.

The fact is that fighting has been going the way of the wooden stick for some time now.

There’s no fighting in college hockey. That’s where Cale Makar and Tage Thompson and countless others cut their teeth and developed before coming to the NHL. There’s barely any fighting in the playoffs. And that’s arguably the part of the season that features the most hits and physicality.

Yeah, there’s still fights. But they are mostly spontaneous, heat-of-the-battle kind of affairs. There’s no Colton Orr or Derek Boogaard staging fights anywhere. If you fight nowadays, it’s because something happened on the ice that led to a couple of players dropping the gloves and duking it out.

Kind of like when a batter gets beaned and charges the mound. If you do that in baseball, you get ejected. Now, something similar could happen in hockey.

Is that really such a bad thing?