I've seen fights turn the tide and wake a team up, so I understand why someone would claim fights can wake a team up, but I've also seen more fights totally kill a teams chances.
Team toughness and compete level isn't correlated to fighting, and you can win without fighting, but not without the toughness and compete.
Right now we are 30th in the NHL by a WIDE margin in mins short handed vs on the power play. That has been the biggest problem with the team. Luckily we have a decent PK or we would be dead in the water instead of hovering in the middle of the pack. Someone brought up getting Tootoo in this thread, Which would be crazy, he should be called Twotwo, he takes so many penalties.
What we need to do is turn the other cheek. No retaliation penalties. Lots of our players are excellent at drawing penalties, Karlsson from skill, Spezza, Ryan, Michalek from skill as well. Conacher from feistiness, MacArthur from being everywhere, Neil from being a top pest and pain in the behind as we'll as physical. We need to draw penalties and not take them.
We don't need to prove we are physical, we are not some soft team and I don't think anyone thinks we are, we can be a frustrated team and take penalties we don't need to take (yes, looking at you Zack Smith). We need to find a way to be around equal in penalty minutes for and against not on average down about 3 minutes every single game.
