Madison Square Garden wasn’t hosting a boxing match, but there sure were a lot of punches being thrown.
While the NHL is known to contain one fight every few games, Monday night, one game turned ugly faster than ever and involved more than two players.
Monday, March 19, the New Jersey Devils took on the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden and the game quickly got heated.
The tension was evident from the start. At the very beginning of the game, a game line brawl broke out and the ice became more of a boxing ring for quite a few players.
The players started shoving each other and quickly ripped off their gloves and began giving jabs. Ryan Carter took on Stu Bickel, Cam Janssen took on Brandon Prust and Eric Boulton took on Michael Rupp.
“We have a lot of cameras and we’re going to need them,” the announcer reportedly said.
After a few minutes the fights died down, and blood needed to be cleaned off the ice. The six players were each given a 5-minute major for fighting while Bryce Salvador was given a 10-minute misconduct for trying to pull Bickel off Carter, reported Huffington Post.
According to the Associated Press, New Jersey Devils player Ryan Carter said New York Rangers player Stu Bickel asked him to fight before the puck was dropped and said that the request was unnecessary.
“I think the gesture of moving a D-man up to take the opening faceoff says something about that,” he told Fire & Ice.
A video of the fight went viral thanks to HockeyFights.com, and has proved to be quite popular since being posted on YouTube Monday, collecting over 917,473 views.
Check it out.
