Dave Isaac

@davegisaac

It was Jake Voracek’s fifth year in the league when it finally happened.

The Flyers were playing the Washington Capitals and Steve Oleksy had an open-ice hit on Claude Giroux that Voracek didn’t like too much. He dropped the gloves and traded punches with Oleksy, who had three fights in 15 games at that point.

Voracek just happened to be on the ice at the time and Zac Rinaldo was the only player in the lineup that night that had the penchant for punching to make Oleksy answer for the hit.

Enforcers had largely become extinct in the NHL so skilled players like Voracek started handling their own business or sticking up for teammates. It was his first regular-season NHL fight and he had only dropped his mitts twice in junior hockey and once in the preseason two years prior.

“No, when you drop them you just pray that you don’t get knocked out,” Voracek said. “You can get hit — if you can handle it, it’s fine — but if you get hit you can miss a long period of time. Probably just the action. It’s a heat of the moment. Sometimes it happens and I think it’s still good for the game that it’s happening like that because those guys that are still running around, they know that somethings coming to them.”

The last enforcer the Flyers carried on their roster was Jay Rosehill in the 2013-14 season. The ensuing fall they waived him and sent him to the American Hockey League. The Broad Street Bullies couldn’t live up to their old moniker. The Flyers were one of the last teams in the NHL to carry a fighter.

These days they’re largely unnecessary. According to hockeyfights.com, there were 469 fights league-wide in Rosehill’s final NHL season and last year there were 344.

“It’s tough because you don’t have much hitting anymore,” Voracek explained. “You still have the contact, but you don’t have those heavy, open-ice hits. If you just miss that guy a little bit and you hit him on the chin or something, you get suspended five games and you don’t want that.”

These days Rosehill is in Britain’s EIHL, a typical landing spot for a former NHL fighter whose role went by the wayside, playing for the Braehead Clan. Former AHL heavyweight Zack Fitzgerald, who spent two seasons with the Phantoms, leads the EIHL in penalty minutes with 152. Ex-NHLer Brian McGrattan, who had 609 penalty minutes in 317 career games, is fifth in the EIHL in penalty minutes, still throwing punches at age 35.

Meanwhile in the NHL, the skilled players are the ones dropping the gloves. Claude Giroux doesn’t do it often, but he has four regular-season fights in 630 games.

“I guess I’m pretty lucky to have Wayne (Simmonds) on my team,” Giroux said with a grin. “We have a lot of guys that can fight like other teams, but you can see other teams focus more on trying to stay out of the box.”

With that goal of staying out of the box teams stopped wasting roster spots on players who would only go out for six minutes a night and couldn’t shoot a puck. Simmonds may be one of the most feared fighters in the league these days, but he’s also a 30-goal scorer. A first-time All-Star, he’s on pace to hit 30 again this season.

“Some guys are able to fight their own battles now just because they’re not going to be going against a killer,” Simmonds said. “They’ll be going against someone who’s probably not usually fighting all the time. I think for me, we called them rats. You’ve got those little rats going around doing their dirty little stuff and some guys you just want to grab a hold of and pummel. I think for the most part it hasn’t been too bad on star players, I think, not too bad.”

The game has changed. There aren’t big goons running around the ice anymore and there aren’t enough instances of star players being targeted to justify the existence of hulking boxers on skates.

What happens more often than skill players like Voracek and Simmonds settling their own scores are the “rats” looking to goad opponents into the penalty box.

“You’ve got guys running around doing stupid stuff and then guys don’t want to answer the bell,” Simmonds said. “They’ll two-hand (slash) you, they’ll butt-end you, they’ll knee you and then you go to confront them and they don’t want to do anything about it. They try to draw a penalty (for retaliation). I don’t think that’s the way the game’s played or should be played. If you’re going to do something dirty … back it up. If you’re gonna do something that’s going to warrant a fight, back it up. Trust me, I could use harsher words.”

And in the cases like that, skilled players can both give it and take it.

“I’ve been hit so many times over the years,” Voracek said. “You don’t have to go that far back, I got smoked by (Buffalo defenseman Dmitry) Kulikov this year. Back in the day, there would probably be something more out of it. In today’s hockey, it’s really different.”

Dave Isaac; 856-486-2479;disaac@gannett.com