That's looking at the past with rose colored glasses. The NHL of the 80s/90s was as case study of ever escalating violence, frequent bench clearing brawls, players who specialized in intentionally injuring opponents, and outright assaults on the ice.
NHL isn't perfect(or even really good) on enforcing the player safety stuff, but clamping down on the brawling is one of the few forward thinking things they did when Bettman took over. If they hadn't done it at the time, they would have been forced to deal with it in the future as the era of 24/7 media and sports media networks highlighted and sensationalized every violent outburst and dangerous injury that would have resulted if the league tried to stay the course.
Frequent bench clearing brawls in the 80’s and 90’s? If your definition of frequent is pretty much none in the 90’s and about 10 a year average in until Spring of 87 when they were legislated out of existence, then I guess they were frequent.
When you have rats running around today doing shit like Hartman does you need players to be able to police the game, especially when the referees are seemingly incapable of doing it and DOPS is run by Maggie the Monkey.
Today it’s a joke when there are scrums and players say their worst nasty words, politically, correct, of course, and give the stinky glove. All it does is waste time and the players look like fools for doing it. The referees should call delay of game anytime there’s a scrum because it’s just one giant pissing contest and a waste of time.
The 80s and 90s had more scraps and line brawls and not saying that that’s how the game should be played but today you can put eggs in your shoulder pads and there would hardly be any broken by the end of a game.
Today’s game basically looks like women’s hockey with no body checking, and if there is a good solid hit some douche bag thinks you need to fight at the end of it, which is laughable.
NHL is getting to the point where they might as well take the blades off sticks, get rid of the puck and just play with a big rubber ring. The pendulum has swung way too far where hockey is becoming a non-contact sport and quite frankly too many games are like watching paint dry.
