My first experience with hockey as a kid was through a game called NHL Hitz 2003. It was the hockey edition of the exaggerated arcade-style sports games made by Midway in the early 2000s (stuff like MLB Slugfest and NFL Blitz). It's a 3-on-3 game that heavily plays up the physicality-- the kind of game where a fan would feel cheated if they didn't see at least one person get bodychecked through the glass. Of course, this game wouldn't be complete without a sacred institution: fighting.

In the modern game of hockey, fighting has seen a significant downturn. The days of guys like Bob Probert are gone, and one of the fights I saw while researching hockey fighting in general showed footage of the combatants chatting during the pre-game, planning when they were going to drop their gloves instead of two enforcers going at it in the heat of the moment. Is it a good thing fighting has dropped off? In real life yeah probably-- hockey's already a very physical sport and injuries from taking a punch to the jaw probably don't need to be added on top of that. In the world of fiction however, players can compete in the ring of honor with the only risk of injury being to their pride.

All this to ask the question: who are the fighters of the SHL? Who are the ones who most readily drop their gloves and send their opponent tumbling to the ground the best? How hard could it be to collate all of the available data and try to piece together a history of fighting in the SHL? Well to answer the latter, both easier and harder than you might think. This is the journey through the start of SHL Drop Your Gloves.

Through some digging around on the forums, the most complete list of data available is found HERE. It features the index files from every SHL season stretching back to S3. Some of them are more complete than others, and some are more convenient to use than others too. Broadly, there are 4 different "eras" of the index:
S3-S27: Stats Only
S28-S52: STHS
S53-S65: FHM6
S66-Present: FHM8

Each era has its own quirks when approaching a project of this scale. The Stats Only era doesn't have any individual games to look at, so our only source for fights will be the stats given (which, to be fair, seem fairly robust). The STHS era uses .txt files for everything, but within the file for each game is a complete play-by-play of every single event, and therefore the best validation for fights and results. The move to FHM6 brought with it a new index with new ways of figuring out when fights occurred, but also a complication in determining the results of those fights (which I'll touch on in a bit). FHM8 brought with it a much easier way to find each fight, but still carries the same issue that FHM6 did for results. This article covers my journey through importing and figuring out what to do with the FHM8 era of fighting in the SHL.

There are a few different ways to designate a result in a player's statline. Of course you have wins, losses, and no decisions (also called ties), but they are also identified by whether we can assign the result to a specific fight. These categories are confirmed, known, and unknown. Confirmed results are those for which we can find the fights, the ones where can identify the game, their combatants, and the decision. Known results are those for which we have enough information to determine that the fight occurred and that the result exists, but for which our information is incomplete; we can't pull up the specific fight. Unknown results are times we can identify that the players engaged in a fight, but for which we can't identify a decision.

For the FHM8 era, it's easy for us to identify every fight that's occurred. Every index comes with a summary that lists out every penalty assessed over the course of a season. Grab that, filter by Fighting penalties, cut out the preseason and playoff games, and you're already most of the way done. You would think this means it's just a matter of pulling the fights and picking out the wins and losses, but FHM has a little quirk in how it tracks those stats. Despite allowing No Decisions to occur in fights, FHM only ever assigns Wins and Losses. Since every fight is tracked, this means that No Decisions are lumped in with Losses. This creates a problem for a few players who get a mixed record in different seasons.

Billy Hill is the first player I encountered this problem with, collecting a listed 1-1 record in S75. Their opponents, Patches The III and Rod Cocker, are both listed with 1 loss apiece. We know that Billy Hill won one of these fights, and since neither of the opponents have a win we can duduce that one of them must have been a No Decision. The problem is simple: which one was which? Without a replay or the generated play-by-play, I couldn't figure out a way to find out. Billy Hill is stuck without any confirmed record (only a known 1-0-1), and the opponents with an unknown result with the only clue we have being that it wasn't a win. This situation (which also occurred with Edzus Ozolins, Towelie, and their opponents in earlier seasons) was the main cause of both the discrepency between confirmed and known records and empty records with unknown results.

Other than that though, the process for figuring out the records was pretty simple. We have the seasonal penalty summaries, so importing that .csv and the skater stat sheet and formatting it only took a little while once I figured out the sheet infrastructure. So now that I have it all imported, what can we learn about fighting in the FHM8 days of the SHL?

One thing of note is that fighting has actually seen a significant increase over the past couple of seasons. Of the 137 fights in the past 10 seasons, 45 of them happened over the course of S74 and S75. The most peaceful years were S67 and S68, with 7 and 8 fights respectively. This comes out to roughly .016 fights per game (F/G) over the range, with S75 maxing out at .03 F/G and S67 being the minimum at .008 F/G. However, even the increase we've seen comes nowhere close to real life.

I mentioned that fighting has been heavily discouraged in real life hockey, but not even it has reached the peace we're currently experiencing. In the 2022-23 season, the NHL recorded a F/G of about .255; roughly 1 fight in every 4 games. To get even more peaceful, we have to reach back to the 1960s when a single-season F/G of 0.14 was recorded; about 1 fight in every 7 games. In S75, far and away the most prolific year for fighting in the past ten, you could only expect a fight once every 33 games. The modern SHL is safer than even the most tame version of real-life professional hockey.

But even in these past 10 seasons of peace, there are still standouts. The most prolific (though not necessarily most successful) fighter is Towelie with 6 fights, through which they've racked up a known 4-0-2 record. There are three contenders for the belt of the champion of FHM8 so far: Andren Akerson, Jarrod Lakemore, and Sven Panda. Each of these fighters boast a confirmed 5-0-0 record, with other claimants to a perfect record falling short in the number of fights they've participated in. At the bottom of the list is Oles Kobliska, the only fighter with 3 losses to their name. While Kobliska is a great player, securing the best Plus-Minus and scoring the most shorthanded goals this past season, fighting just isn't their strong suit.

I hope you all enjoyed a look into fighting in the SHL! I do plan on continuing this project, although with school and having to figure out a way to either input data more efficiently or set aside a bunch of time to do it by hand, I imagine it will be a while before another update. If you want to take a look at the sheet for yourself, you can do so at the link HERE.

Also, if anybody has a way to access play-by-play data from the SHL games played between S53 and S75 or the indexes for S1 and S2, I'd greatly appreciate it so that we can have a complete record and confirm all the results we can from these seasons. Thanks for reading!

#1 Smitty Werbenjaegermanjensen - Left Defense
Drafted 12 OA by the Detroit Falcons
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SEASON STATS
S76: IN-PROGRESS
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HONORS & AWARDS

I've noticed in this new draft class in particular there's a lot more players jacking up their Fighting and Aggression stats. I'm hoping this will mean a return to the goon it up days!

     S76 SMJHL DRAFT 3RD OVERALL PICK    

Much love for the Hillbilly shoutout!

yooo my guy is mentioned i wonder what it is ab- fighting. of course.

great article!!

Thank you to @Revontulete for the sig! 

It's no coincidence that fighting ramped up as soon as Akerson entered the league. He also had a successful bout in the IIHF. We're bringin' back the old time hockey!

Good article, I've always loved the story lines you can get in this league with the players who are dedicated to bringing a bit of the rough and tumble to their players instead of all scoring all the time.

Andren Akerson (Present)
Adrik Baranov (S55 to S70)
Rurik Razin (S32 to S44)
Roy Razin (S17 to S32) (HOF/Rage HOF)
Audun Wissink (S5 to S15)