Somebody To Shove

I've been watching the new Professional Women's Hockey League, and it's been pretty fun. Fans have really embraced it, and given games a lot of energy. and atmosphere that comes through even on TV.

One thing that's changed since previous women's hockey is an increase in physicality. Women's hockey has generally avoided it in the past; most women's hockey bans bodychecking, and the marquee events have been international tournaments that are more likely to crack down on physical confrontations outside of the game itself.

But the PWHL has been far more permissive of things, both during and after the play. This has generally been welcomed by announcers and journalists.

I'm less enthusiastic about it: granted, I'm not a fan of hockey fights, but I can understand what people see in it. After all, fighting has been made into a number of other sports, from boxing to mixed-martial arts. So — putting aside any moral considerations for the moment — there's clearly an appetite for it. And hockey's lax rule enforcement is just asking for vigilante justice. Having said that, I've noticed that many fights come down to one of three motivations, each of which makes the fight seem irrelevant: 

• Enforcers fighting each other, not because of any beef between them or their teams, but just to justify their employment. 
• Interminable fights at the end of a blowout, as the losing team tries to "send a message," not realizing the message is, "look everyone, we just got out ass kicked."
• Revenge for a hard play that was totally legal, but pissed the team off.

Of course, the classic provocation for fighting is revenge for a cheap shot. Personally, I'd rather have a sport where the rules were enforced, but if that's not going to happen, then I can certainly understand why players often take the law into their own gloveless hands.

But hockey's anarchic nature has created one offshoot that I truly don't get: the pushing and shoving that follows so many stoppages in play. It really slows the game down, while providing little entertainment value. 

For one thing, watching people push each other is not very exciting. Fighting may have been turned into several sports, but you notice how there is no sport of pushing and shoving? Well, there's a reason for that: there isn't much pay-per-view money in the Ultimate Shoving Challenge.

But the other, even worse aspect is that the shoving is so artificial; fighting as revenge for a dirty play is at least connected of the game. But the shoving is meaningless playground-level tactics: players hit after the whistle to provoke the opposition, or accidentally-on-purpose bump into each other to start something. It's as believable as a Three Stooges routine, but treated with deadly seriousness. I got more than my fill of that on the playground back in the day.

Yet I seem to be in the minority on this one. Lots of people in the hockey world can't get enough of those post-whistle scrums. I think they see them as a substitute for the fighting which has become a rarer part of the game. But you’d think that given how important fighting is to hockey culture, and that these shoving matches are a pale imitation of fights, that they’d be seen as a wimpy, half-hearted substitute. But no, hockey culture embraces the shoving and the elementary school posturing that comes with it.

Which brings us back to the PWHL. We haven’t seen actual fights there, as the full-face masks will strongly discourage that sort of thing. But there's a great amount of the post-play shoving. Commentators tend to like this and get really excited. I can’t always tell if this is genuine enthusiasm for the scrum itself, or just the superficial assumption that this makes it more like the men's game, so it must be a good thing.

But to me, it’s a worst-of-both-worlds situation. Of all the physical aspects of the men’s game, they’ve imported the least entertaining.