*Action pack

Don Cherry would be proud.

Grace, skill, teamwork... Hockey would be my favorite sport if it weren't for this.

Professional Hockey Players are, and let me make sure my little 'ol opinion here is clear, THE biggest fucking pussies of any sportsmen in the history of humanity.

There is some magical combination of rules, history and fan-service here that have allowed for this literal intellectual retardation of behavior in sports that is unique to hockey.

Hockey: One of Earths greatest sports.
Hockey: Earths stupidest athletes.

Hockey? That's Closing Time at every single bar in the nation.

Hockey has this, Soccer has this shit:
http://youtu.be/LC-H2wXK4T4

Screw sports, i'll stick to vidya games

They each landed a lot of square, bare-fisted blows for them not to end up suffering concussion, brain damage, skull fractures, death, etc.

It is very much like soccer players and their diving theatrics. I would go so far as to say it's cruel that the players are obligated to pretend to fight, even if they are good at pulling their punches.

Do you seriously think hockey fights are fake? Some of them are staged, which to me is stupid, but even those are real fights. I like some fights, but due to concussions, it won't be long before it's mostly out of the game.

Absolutely. I don't mean this in the WWF sense of "fake," but certainly in the sense that the players are obligated to fight as part of the show, know this, and don't really want to hurt one another. They're cooperatively putting on a show to get the spectators riled up. It's not stage fighting, but it's not real fighting either.

The main point regarding this video is that two men of that size and athleticism in the same situation, were they not holding back almost entirely, would kill each other in short order. Even so, I'd agree that they're hitting hard enough so that they're risking unnecessary brain damage over the longer term, which is why I think it's cruel. As they say about boxers: it's not the big hits that do them in, it's the accumulation of all the little hits.

Of course, there is a part of me that likes the fights too, but I personally would prefer ice hockey without them.

I'm Canadian and I don't get the appeal of NHL. It's a bunch of tax-supported multi-millionaires skating around wearing the uniform of a city that they probably don't even know -- it just happens to be the one willing to pay the money they're demanding.
Except for combat sports where there's a real risk of serious injury or death, there isn't a professional athlete anywhere who is worth their paycheque. Watch school level sports to see kids who play it for the pure love of the game...

Players aren't obligated to fight. There are usually just a couple of guys per Team that are fighters. They DO really want to hurt each other. Broken cheekbones, broken noses, broken jaws, concussions, bloody nose, ... are often the result of fights. My definition of the term staged fights in the NHL is where two fighters agree to have a fight and it's not just part of the normal flow of the game or due to something else that's happened during the course of the game. I think the main reason there are not more injuries during fights is that it's not an easy skill especially on skates. Here's a good article on the role of the enforcer in the NHL (three part series is long, but very informative)...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/sports/hockey/derek-boogaard-a-boy-learns-to-brawl.html?pagewanted=all

luckily for hockey players, a real punch comes from the feet and hips up.