There was skirmish after skirmish and a parade the penalty box, especially late in a crazy first period.

For whatever reason, the Penguins and Panthers went at each other on Saturday, racking up a combined 76 penalty minutes, which included 28 in less than a minute late in the first period.

But in all the chaos, there were only four fighting majors.

And that's been the general trend all year: Fighting is dying.

Heading into Sunday's games, there had been only 0.35 fights per game in the NHL, the lowest pace in 45 years going back to the 1968-69 season.

The league's top fighter – Colorado's Cody McLeod – had only eight majors in 32 games.

Forty per cent of the way into the 2014-15 season, 12 teams don't even have 10 fights. That includes the most dramatically rehabilitated team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, who have dropped from a league-leading 48 last season to being on pace for fewer than 15 this year (six after 33 games).

The biggest difference in the league is the obvious elimination of low-minute goons. Pittsburgh's Steve Downie leads the NHL in penalty minutes (135 in 32 games) but he plays 13 minutes a night and contributes on the scoresheet.

The number of forwards who have played the majority of the games with less than 10 minutes of ice time a night is down to only 14 of 300 players leaguewide. Of those, very few are one-dimensional fighters.

You could see this coming in the off-season. Fighters such as George Parros, Kevin Westgarth, Paul Bissonnette, Krys Barch and others couldn't find NHL contracts and were forced to look elsewhere for employment.

Parros and Barch retired. Westgarth is playing in Northern Ireland, where he has eight points in 10 games and a relatively low PIM total. Bissonnette is in the AHL and has yet to fight.

Fighting remains far more prevalent in the minors than the NHL, but it's worth noting that it's also way down in both the OHL and WHL, where efforts have been made to limit the number of times the gloves are dropped.

At this point, the decline at the NHL level could now be hastened by two things.

No. 1, the fighters remaining in the league don't have a whole lot of other guys to fight.

No. 2, the feeder leagues for the NHL, led by the Canadian junior ones, simply won't have many players who fight routinely.

The "end of the enforcer" has been predicted for decades, but at this point, this does feel like the death knell.