Yeah, but when Mike Milbury's beating a guy in the stands with his shoe... I don't know. I don't think the 90s has anything to compete with that. But then there was that guy in the 50s (?) who tried to kill a guy with his skate.
I think today's athlete is so advanced that those old styles would result in multiple deaths, which is why we have to get it out of the game. But the game has gotten progressively less violent, it seems. The 90s was probably the last true "violent" era of hockey, which is why we think of it when we think of the difference in the game, but just watching NHL classics (or whatever it was that NHL.tv had a few years back, where you could watch thousands of old games), you could see the 80s were insane and dirty, and the 70s pretty much had an entire metagame of intimidation going on under the surface.
Either way, as fun as it is to rewatch those times and remember them, depending on what generation you grew up on, I do think it was a necessity to soften up the game. It's played at too high a speed now, with even the larger players able to move at high speeds (for the most part), to go back. I don't know. I know the change started before Bertuzzi-Moore, but I think Bertuzzi-Moore is the moment we can point to where we realized multiple things had to change. It all snowballed pretty quickly after that, from removing muggings (which weren't uncommon in the 80s and 90s, I don't think) to removing hits to the head altogether (probably the Marc Savard hit that changed thinking on that?).
