As far as Riley Cote is concerned, the NHL is going too far in trying to legislate rules to control fighting
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As far as Riley Cote is concerned, the NHL is going too far in trying to legislate rules to control fighting. He believes if the league follows the general managers' recommendation to give misconduct penalties for staged fighting, the players will find a way around it.

Staged fights are those that begin immediately after faceoffs and are agreed to by both combatants before the drop of the puck. At the conclusion of their Florida meetings this week, the general managers voted to forward a new rule for approval this summer by the competition committee that will result in 10-minute misconduct penalties for staged fighting.

But that, argues the Flyers' pugilist, will only change the way fights begin, and nothing else.

"So, if they have this staged-fighting rule, what you're going to do is line up to the guy, you're going to push him," Cote said. "You're going to be like, 'All right, you push me, I'll push you back, you slash me, I'll slash you back, then we'll make it look like a hockey play.' That's what it's going to amount to.

"Instead of dropping the gloves here, we'll skate over there, push each other a little bit and then that won't be a staged fight because that's part of hockey."

The proposed rule change follows a seasonlong debate about the place of fighting in hockey and the increased chance for injury due to the fact that NHL fighters are bigger, stronger and better trained for what they do than ever before.

The debate heightened after several serious fighting injuries this year and the death of Ontario native Don Sanderson, whose head struck the ice during a fight in an amateur league.

Hockey-fighting proponents argue that the death was a rare occurrence and that most fights result in minor injury, if any. Furthermore, they say that fighting has long been part of the game and a way to keep star players from getting hurt by bigger, lesser-skilled players.

The NHL said that of the first 500 fights this season, 108 of them, or 21.6 percent, began at faceoffs, which they determined were "staged fights."

Cote said this is only the result of earlier league rules to deal with fighting, particularly the instigator rule that gives an extra 2-minute penalty to a player who is determined to have started a fight without provocation.

"The whole staged-fighting thing has evolved because of the instigator rule," Cote said. "You put that into play and guys are worried about putting their teams down all the time.

"Well, now it's more of a mutual agreement. You're down two goals, you want to get a momentum boost so you stir it up. You push the guy, you get a fight. But it's not as easy as it looks sometimes to get a big bodycheck and get somebody to come after you.

"Like [Tuesday night against Buffalo], we were down a goal so I slashed [Patrick Kaleta]. I was pretty sure he wasn't going to fight me, but I wanted to make it known, 'If you're going to run around, I'm going to fight you.'

"If a tough guy runs one of our guys and I'm not out there exactly at that time to deal with it, well, my next shift I'm going to go out there and try and deal with it. So from the outside looking in, it looks like a staged fight, but it's not.

"It's more so just working around the rules that they put into place. I don't want to get a 2-, 5- and 10-[minute penalty]. I don't care about the 10, I'll take the 10, but the extra 2 could be the difference-maker in a hockey game and I don't want to put my team down by a selfish act.

"That's why staged fighting is happening. You get 5 minutes each. Both go to the penalty box, you both prove a point. I think everyone is just overreacting." *
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