Trending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

A thing that seems to be happening a lot more these days, for reasons that I don't fully understand, is coaches across the NHL handing in their lineup cards with some terribly odd starters.

Tanner Glass, for instance, shouldn't be on a line with Evgeni Malkin and James Neal, as he was against the Rangers last Sunday. Nor should that trio be lining up across from Brad Richards, Rick Nash, and Arron Asham.

Meanwhile, Mike Babcock might think very little of the Blue Jackets these days, but rolling a line of Dan Cleary, Jordin Tootoo, and Justin Abdelkader in Columbus seems like it's beneath a coach we're repeatedly told is among the best and most honorable in the business. Small wonder Todd Richards decided to answer with Derrick Brassard, RJ Umberger, and Jared Boll.

Finally, isn't it odd that Guy Boucher chose to start the Lightning's Monday afternoon game on Long Island by playing 1,000-game boy Vinny Lecavalier with BJ Crombeen and Pierre-Cedric Labrie? Jack Capuano, who's been known to put some real knuckledraggers in his lineup just for the fun of it, answered with Marty Reasoner between Casey Cizikas and Matt Martin.

Not surprisingly, based on those starting lines, what all those games had in common was that fights broke out within between one and three seconds of the puck dropping.

Another thing they had in common is that they were pathetic.

I know it's not a controversial statement to say that staged fights have no place in hockey. The pacifists among hockey's relatively small fanbase have gotten a bit louder over the years, and had their opinions that fighting in the sport is Neanderthalic garbage, the relic of a bygone age, backed up by all those scary deaths of guys who made their living in the sport climbing over the boards for five minutes a night if they were lucky, and punching another guy with the same job in the face for a few dozen seconds.

Those people, generally, are wrong.

Fighting absolutely has a place in the sport of hockey. Or at least, the threat of fighting does. It often serves as a deterrent against other teams taking liberties, if you want to call them that, with star players (though the evidence that even that kind of martial law works is waning these days). It also, sad though it may seem, may occasionally serve to fire up a bench that is otherwise kind of going through the motions. The most famous example of this is the fight between Jarome Iginla and Lecavalier in the 2004 Stanley Cup Final, which energized the Flames to a 3-0 home win after they'd previously gotten trounced 4-1 on the road.

The crap this week, with guys fighting right off the opening draw, falls into the latter category, but serves no purpose. A coach might say that he needs to see his guys get fired up (and indeed, Iginla fighting Lecavalier happened very early in the first period of that Game 3) particularly if the games followed tough losses, but that was only the case for the Red Wings.

The problem with this is that the decision to start these guys comes from the visiting coach. They submit their lineup cards first and, given the rules about home teams having last change, their counterparts hosting the game get to decide how to respond. The smart thing to do in this situation is to put your top line out there against the guys who aren't very good at hockey in general. If a visiting coach wants to start a guy who plays five minutes a night, wouldn't you just take that opportunity to win the opening draw and try to score just seconds into the game?

The answer, it seems, is no.

Worse is the fact that a willingness to start punching another person in the face with nearly 60 minutes of hockey to play is still seen as being valorous, rather than what it actually is, which is stupid.

Said Asham, who got worked pretty good by Tanner Glass (who's considered a lesser fighter but better actual hockey player), said of the scrap, "All fights are to try and get your bench going, get the crowd into it. I thought it was a good time to do it, but it didn’t work out."

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