Fights are up significantly early in the 2026-27 NHL season.
One week into the new campaign, there have been 21 fights in 52 games, a rate of 0.403 fights per contest.
Last season, there were a total of 307 fights in 1,343 games, or 0.23 fights per game, a rate nearly half of what’s being seen early this season.
“It’s a small sample size but there’s a 50 per cent uptick to this point in the season in fighting. I think there’s an easy explanation to that,” TSN Hockey Insider Darren Dreger said on Insider Trading on Tuesday.
“Winnipeg Jets fans now know who Tyrel Bauer is and this guy has now fought a couple of times. You have Nathan MacKinnon, a veteran for the Colorado Avalanche, you’re not used to him doing this, but he’s done it to this point of the regular season.
“No alarms, it’s just more competitiveness in the early part of the new year.”
Bauer, a rookie with the Jets, introduced himself to the league with a pair of fights over his first two NHL games, dropping the gloves with Boston Bruins’ Mark Kastelic on Friday and Detroit Red Wings’ Keegan Kolesar on Sunday.
“You know, it goes a lot more than just the actual physical act of fighting,” he said in a post-game interview with TSN’s Danielle Bain. “You know, I’ve been fighting a long time to get here. I’ve stayed in that fight. That was for my teammates, that was for my family, that was for this city, for keeping faith in me.”
Two of the more surprising combatants early in the season have been veteran forwards MacKinnon and Mark Stone.
The Colorado Avalanche superstar dropped the gloves with defenceman Brandt Clarke in the team’s opener against the Los Angeles Kings. It was the ninth fight of MacKinnon’s NHL career and first since 2022.
“Yeah, it happens,” MacKinnon said postgame. “It’s an intense game. Obviously, he didn’t say a great word to me, so I didn’t like the word. Yeah, we fought.”
Stone took on Seattle Kraken blueliner Brandon Montour on Tuesday night, after a hit from Montour knocked Golden Knights’ forward Victor Olofsson out of the game.
“We took care of business when we needed to take care of business,” Stone said after the game. “He was saying some things about our team I didn’t like. I’m not gonna fight too many 5-on-3s, but I just didn’t like some of the things he was saying about the team.”
Fighting in the NHL has held at a steady level since the 2021-22 season, as each season has held between 0.23 and 0.25 fights per game. If the current rate holds, it will be the most fight-filled season since the 2012-13 season, which contained 0.47 per game.